Disabling the SAT: how the College Board is undermining its premier test - feature

Education Next, Fall, 2003 by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman

IN 1999, AFTER TAKING THE GRADUATE MANAGEMENT Admission Test (GMAT), the standardized exam required of applicants to business schools, Mark Breimhorst sued the test's maker, the powerful Educational Testing Service (ETS). Breimhorst was born without hands and thus had been given more time to complete the admissions exam. His lawsuit contested ETS's practice of informing schools when students take one of its tests under specialized conditions, effectively placing an asterisk or, in testing parlance, a "flag" next to their scores. For unexplained reasons, instead of weathering a trial, ETS settled the case and agreed to stop flagging GMAT scores. This had far-reaching implications, since ETS runs several other major testing programs, including the oracle of college admissions, the SAT. As part of the settlement, Disability Rights Advocates, the civil-rights organization that had represented Breimhorst, and the College Board, the consortium of colleges that owns the SAT, agreed to jointly appoint a panel of "experts" to study whether scores on the SAT should continue to be flagged when students take the test with extended time.

Disability Rights Advocates argued that the flagging of SAT scores violated the rights of students with disabilities by identifying them as disabled, stigmatizing them, and leading many to avoid using accommodations to which they are entitled. Accommodations like extended time, they believe, are necessary to equalize the testing experience for disabled and nondisabled students and thus make the scores of disabled students more valid. In 2002, to avert further litigation, the College Board acted on the expert panel's recommendation to end the practice of flagging scores. (Two weeks later, the other major college-admissions testing program, the ACT, adopted the same policy.) As of October 1, 2003, the Board will no longer note "Nonstandard Administration" on the scores of any students who take the SAT with extended time.

This decision will have an immediate impact on students with disabilities who take the SAT with accommodations, presently 2 percent of the two million students who take the SAT each year. Extended time, the only accommodation flagged by the SAT, is by far the most widely used accommodation, received by nearly all students who obtain accommodations. It is the only accommodation that nearly every test-taker would take advantage of if possible (unlike, say, the exams with larger print that are given to visually impaired students). Since 1976, the population of students designated as having a "specific learning disability" has grown 300 percent; learning-disabled students now compose 50 percent of the special-education population. In turn, since 1987, the number of students taking the SAT with accommodations has grown by more than 300 percent, compared with an 18 percent increase in the test-taking population as a whole (according to an analysis of annual reports from ETS. See side-bar by Samuel Abrams on page 40). Once the alleged "stigma" of flagging is removed, this trend can be expected to continue--and perhaps increase significantly.

The College Board's unfortunate and puzzling action--an action that no court was likely to order if the case had gone to trial--deserves far more scrutiny than it has received so far. While private and without legal standing, this settlement involves giants in the testing industry and may have a chilling effect on validity and technical standards in the nation's K-12 testing programs.

Standards for Testing

To understand how the Board's decision undermines the SAT, it is important to recognize what a "flag" used to do. The SAT is valuable for two main reasons: 1) It provides colleges with a common standard against which to evaluate students who attend high schools with varying grading policies and levels of rigor, and 2) it partially predicts students' grades during their freshman year of college, a measure of how prepared they are for higher education. The College Board website tells aspiring matriculants, "Your scores show colleges how ready you are to handle the work at their institutions and how your verbal and math skills compare with those of other applicants." The flagging of SAT scores protected the test's usefulness as a common standard of measurement by informing readers, such as college-admissions officers, when the test had been taken under unusual conditions, such as receiving time and a half to finish the standard three-hour exam. Without flagging, an admissions officer has no way of knowing whether the SAT scores of two candidates can be compared with one another, since there is no way of knowing whether the two candidates took the test under the same conditions. As of October 2003, admissions officers' ability to assess the meaning of test results and to make reasonable decisions for all students will be compromised. According to press accounts, 79 percent of college-admissions officers opposed the College Board's decision.

Guidelines for administering norm-referenced tests such as the SAT are laid out in professional technical standards that testing companies follow. The leading authority in this regard is the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing developed jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. On the issue of flagging, the most relevant standard reads: