Recycling SAT
Every high school student’s worst nightmare: the SAT. Students have diligently prepared for the test by reviewing with flashcards and analyzing passages, but now they have cracked the code by spending hours memorizing answers to questions. Thanks to the College Board’s “laziness” of reusing past tests, many previous SAT takers are at a great disadvantage.
Many thought that the College Board reused individual questions, but there were cases where they reused the entire test. For example, December 2014 was the same test as November 2013, and January 2014 was the same as November 2013, according to The New York Times. Allowing students to see the test problems before gives those students a better chance in receiving higher score than others.
“I never thought that the College Board would do that. I always expected the College Board to take strict measures to prevent cheating or unfairness, but reusing previous tests, not just few problems, but the entire test, is unacceptable to students,” Junior Marianne Kim said.
Some suspect College Board has been doing this to focus on the new SAT that begins this year, because it takes 18 months and around $350,000 to create a new SAT test, according to Times. Though reusing previous tests were for a good cause of improving the current SAT, it gave some students an advantage of taking the same test twice.
This is a serious problem, since there has been recent scandals in Asian countries like China and South Korea, in which tests administered in the United States were recycled for international use. The “Time Zone” cheating process starts out with people in the United States. sharing/selling previously administered SAT tests overseas to “tutoring” and educational companies.
“I already took the SAT, and just hearing that it’s getting reused is just unfair. It’s just wrong how I spent so much time studying for it, but some people get a better score than me because they already took the test before. That makes the college application system totally wrong. It’s basically cheating,” Junior Iris Jang said.
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