A whisleblower, former College Board executive Manuel Alfaro, on the new SAT.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shining-spotlight-dark-corners-college-board-who-manuel-alfaro
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shining-spotlight-dark-corners-college-board-manuel-alfaro
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shining-spotlight-dark-corners-college-board-questions-manuel-alfaro
It is about time.
A lot of these articles seem like stubs - giving few details, and lacking the background information that a layman (or even someone who keeps track of such things quite closely) would need to decipher them. I would imagine this is what the Panama Papers looked like before they reached the hands of trained writers and/or journalists.
I’m hardly inclined to give the College Board the benefit of the doubt, but the author is making it easy to portray him as a disgruntled employee, the exact outcome he predicts in one of his articles. This approach could actually discredit a valid line of questioning, which would be a shame IMO.
This link is easier to navigate: https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/today/author/0_0wfbO39QcRs8iMxQYHbiqe?trk=prof-sm&_mSplash=1
My assessment is similar to @NotVerySmart’s.
I hope that someone will find out the truth about this. A number of well respected tutors I know have been saying the same things. I think there is a lot of truth in what he says.
This story is relevant to the states, IL, CO, MI, and others mentioned by M. Alfaro, where College Board recently won the state contracts that had been held by the ACT to provide mandatory testing in public schools.
College Board won the state contracts by underbidding ACT by millions of dollars utilizing its deep pocket.
Illinois: SAT – $14.3 million, ACT – $15.67 million; underbid by $1.37 million
Colorado: SAT $14.8 million, ACT – $23.4 million; underbid by $6.6 million
Michigan: SAT – $17.1 million, ACT – $32.5 million; underbid by $15.4 million
http://thecriticalreader.com/is-the-college-board-playing-a-rigged-game/
In the haste to steal away the state contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, M. Alfaro claims, College Board made a number of fraudulent claims on its evidence submitted for the contract peer review.
Not the least of which is the claim that
The redesigned SATs were never given to the committees before student testings, and numerous revisions were necessary after the tests were given to the students.
So much for the “clear, fair, and well-constructed” testing material.
College Board submitted these made-up evidences of critical elements for assessment to the states (CO, CT, DE, IL, ME, MI, and NH) which were then submitted to the federal Department of Education in compliance. Did the states inadvertently participated in the fraud against the federal government?
The question then is,
Can the states affected (CO, CT, DE, IL, ME, MI, and NH) revoke the contracts awarded to the College Board?
What would that take?
IL is in a world of budget hurt so there would be outcry if they were to reverse that decision.
I don’t know if Alfaro’s claims are true, but the very low quality of the rSAT test materials is consistent with his claims. This also would give a more coherent explanation of CB’s attempts to keep tutors from seeing the test materials.
Agree. And the PSAT was a disaster and untested. The results were so all over the place that tthe May reissued concordance was dramatically different from January. The CB has sent this final concordance to schools but refuses to post to their site.
Alfaro’s latest post (June 9) is really troubling.
He says that up to 1/3 of real test questions are experimental questions that have not yet been externally screened and that potentially contain serious flaws. Students who encounter flawed experimental questions may lose a lot of time and become flustered, and this in turn can impact performance on real questions. At least on the old test, the experimental questions were in a separate section.
In addition, he writes “about 200 hundred items were sent to the Content Advisory Committee for review. Their feedback was scathing. One committee member wrote an 11-page document letting the College Board know that these were the worst items he had ever seen.”
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/pulse/shining-spotlight-dark-corners-college-board-process-sat-alfaro
Shouldn’t the media follow up on these serious accusations? Reuters? NY Times? Anyone?
Exactly
I am waiting for someone to do an investigative report.
It seems that Alfaro is not yet talking to the media.
I don’t think this petition will reach 100K in 5 days :))
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/investigate-college-board-making-false-claims-about-redesigned-sat
There do seem to be a lot of indications that CollegeBoard is up to shady stuff. But I wish Alfaro would not make me cringe quite so much when I read his posts.
I cannot believe he is suggesting that students sue colleges when they don’t get in and blame the SAT. Even if such a case happened it would be near impossible to prove. Perhaps more importantly any student who did this and received media coverage (presumably what Alfaro wants) would immediately be skewered as a whiny entitled millennial even if their sole reason for suing really was to bring down the mighty CB.
And what’s with his cancer analogy and claim that even the very worst case problems caused by the SAT would in any way be worse than dying of cancer??? I just… I’m speechless.
But back to the CB and the possibility that these particular claims are true – I can’t imagine that the ACT is not on this. They stand to lose millions. Alfara says the states who signed the recent deals can demand the actual documents which prove corruption. Surely the ACT could nudge at least one state to do the right thing and then provide a crack team of experts and lawyers to take a look.
I am beginning to think David Coleman was secretly hired by ACT, fairtest.org, or CC to bring down SAT.
Love conspiracy theories :))
While various aspects of Alfaro’s posts may be questionable, I think we should not lose sight of the main issue. He makes very specific and troubling claims about CB procedure and test construction:
Is anyone following up on these claims? Why hasn’t Alfaro taken his story to the media?
Didn’t someone post an example of a question that made no sense? “You have a pitcher of water with 127 ounces in it. How many glasses can you fill from it?” without any mention of how big the glass was.
Colorado parents did complain and the ACT testing was extended for one year.
@twoinanddone Do you have a link?
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@twoinanddone Since links are not allowed by CC, instead of a link, can you describe how you found out that Colorado parents complained about the rSAT and as a result, the Colorado ACT contract was continued for another year?