Approx. 400 SAT Items Leaked To Reuters News Agency

After his stint as a “lead architect” for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), David Coleman landed the presidency of one of the CCSS insider groups, the College Board.

He decided to “redesign” the SAT– but he apparently did not redesign the test security to go along with it.

Ineptness from the College Board, including under David Coleman’s leadership,  is not news. 

What is new, however, is that someone decided to send Reuters news agency hundreds of questions from the redesigned SAT, as Reuters reports on August 03, 2016:

Just months after the College Board unveiled the new SAT this March, a person with access to material for upcoming versions of the redesigned exam provided Reuters with hundreds of confidential test items. The questions and answers include 21 reading passages – each with about a dozen questions – and about 160 math problems.

Reuters doesn’t know how widely the items have circulated. …

The materials provided to Reuters contain a wealth of items for upcoming tests: reading passages drawn from novels, historical documents, scientific journals, essays and other texts, each accompanied by questions. Also among the materials were math problems involving geometry and quadratic equations.

To verify the authenticity of the items, which totaled approximately 400, Reuters contacted the College Board; showed it the items, and asked if the items were genuine.

The College Board’s attorney responded that publishing the items would (as Reuters notes) “render them unusable” and “inflict injuries on the College Board.” College Board rep Sandra Riley noted that the material that Reuters received constitutes “a serious criminal matter.”

I guess that means yes.

And the leak appears to be coming from the College Board’s own people.

Perhaps the leak is a way for those at the College Board who believe the new SAT is a load of junk to try to unburden their own consciences for having helped create it. That is just my guess, but it is an educated guess given that former College Board exec Manuel Alfaro has already gone public with details about how poorly constructed the new SAT is. (Note: I am not implying that Alfaro leaked the items to Reuters. Some insider did so, and there are of course  many insiders, not just Alfaro.)

As for the Reuters situation: Reuters states that it does not know if the items were sent only to Reuters or were more widely dispersed.

I don’t think it will take long for either the College Board or Reuters to find out.

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Originally posted 08-04-16 at deutsch29.wordpress.com.

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Schneider is a southern Louisiana native, career teacher, trained researcher, and author of both A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who In the Implosion of American Public Education  and Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? .

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