Education
Related: About this forumCollege Board calls off special SAT date for affluent, gifted students
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/college-board-calls-off-special-sat-date-for-affluent-gifted-students/2012/06/06/gJQALZvrIV_story.htmlThe College Board has canceled a controversial plan to offer a special session of the SAT college entrance exam to students in a $4,500 summer program at Amherst College.
Students in the three-week college prep program were to have taken the SAT on Aug. 3. Sponsors touted it as a unique opportunity for students to sit for the SAT outside the busy academic year.
Reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Standardized test critics FairTest called for the New York nonprofit to halt the test, while bloggers and editorial writers assailed the prospect of affluent, gifted students gaining yet another advantage over other college applicants.
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One partner in the summer program is the Princeton Review, a for-profit test-preparation company. (The Washington Post Co., too, offers for-profit test preparation through its Kaplan Test Prep.) The College Board has long discouraged test-prep classes, citing research that suggests they have little impact on scores.
Earlier thread on this here.
elleng
(130,126 posts)MADem
(135,425 posts)Those rich punks can sit in uncomfortable seats with flickering fluorescent lights overhead, and machinery running in the distance, in a room that is either too warm or too cold, and try to concentrate with the rest of the poor slobs!
Disgraceful that this "opportunity" included a partnership with a for profit test prep outfit.
exboyfil
(17,857 posts)who is about to take the ACT this morning with no prep except for the 1-2 hours we spent last night going over the sample test in the booklet. She is an experiment (not intended as such but her online Economics course ran a little long). I plan to take the seven weeks she has off from her college classes after the Fall semester to run her through my own intensive ACT prep (she is half time college and half time 11th grade next year) for the Feb. ACT test. I wish we did not have to do this prep work, but the merit scholarships to the state school require a 33 minimum to be competitive (still no guarantee).
I wonder how much College Board paid to extricate themselves from the problem. The SAT at the end (which was supposed to be labelled a June test even though it was not) was the cherry on the top of this $5K prep program. Those who sent in their cash are going to be angry. College Board needs to answer for why they planned to deceive those colleges which use their exam for placement and scholarship decisions (marking the tests as June is fraud in my book). I am a little sorry that the whistle was blown before they could take and send those tests in.
mbperrin
(7,672 posts)Special exceptions don't fit the bill.