College Board Keeps Apologizing For Screwing Up Digital SAT and AP Tests (arstechnica.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate Anderson: Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board -- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. [...] College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption, though. [...]
College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test -- and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. [...] College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption, though. [...]
College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test -- and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher.
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Most require some training, but nothing like a four-year degree.
And many have paid apprenticeships.
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Yeah about that (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh and you will spend a lot of your own time and money in classes learning the more advanced stuff if you want to try and make good money.
I can't speak directly for the go-to, plumbers, but I can tell you that among the electricians the only jobs that paid really really well besides owning your own company were the guys that did the work on the big HVAC systems for large buildings. It was great work but it took a long time to get into it and they're frankly just wasn't a lot of that work to go around.
One thing I can say about plumbers is that if they don't own their own businesses they make about the same as everybody else without a college degree 20 an hour or so. And I've said it before and I will say it again if you are a plumber who owns your own business you're not a plumber, you're a small business owner who happens to plumb.
That's important because not everybody can run a small business, especially someone who couldn't hack it in college. Some of those guys find a wife to do all the business work like accounting and advertising and managing the other guys working under you.
But that last one is a bit of a problem too because in the old days when our economy was growing you could count on starting your business and having a bunch of guys working under you and then they would go off and start their businesses elsewhere and you wouldn't have to compete nearly as much because the whole economy and country was growing rapidly and that meant new cities and towns and expansion.
We're not growing anymore because we've moved too much money to the top 1%, so you're competing with those guys head on.
Again stepping away from plumbers but I've known a couple locksmiths and a guy who did car stereo installs that lost their businesses when their employees split off and took a bunch of their customers with them.
I'm saying the kind of economy that everybody here on
But that's not going to stop a bunch of nostalgic old farts from pretending it does.
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You didn't like it, and prefer going five or six figures in debt getting a degree that may or may give you saleable job skills rather than being paid while you learn? That seems to be what you're saying. Couldn't be bothered to read more than the first paragraph or so, since you didn't seem to actually have anything to say.
Abusing the nonprofit tax exempt status (Score:3)
They have $1 billion in assets and sell over $1 billion a year and make $45 million in profit every year.
Should the nonprofit tax exempt status eventually be evaluated that at some level non-governmental non-profits pay income or asset based taxes?
The figures below are the tax return, that does not even consider what is paid to subcontractors and vendors who may or may not have a link to the College Board or its staff.
College Board 2023 numbers from ProPublica nonprofit explorer
https://projects.propublica.o [propublica.org]
Dude I'm fucking old (Score:2, Insightful)
Back in my day the government paid 80% of tuition.
When my kid hit College the government paid 30%. I covered the rest because I'm not a piece of shit.
I fucking hate you latter pulling assholes. You had socialism up your ass when you grew up and you took it away from everyone else because you're a fucktard.
Funny thing is there's a good chance you're still Gen x and you're going to get hit hard by the bullshit Trump is going to do to you.
Have fu
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing I wish people could understand is if you are running a plumber business and it's successful first and foremost you are heavily dependent on a ever-shrinking middle class that can afford to hire plumbers. And second you're not a plumber. You are a small business owner who happens to plumb. If on the other hand you are someone who is not good at running a small business then unless you get lucky and marry someone who is then you're not going to be a success and you're going to go back to working for $20 an hour for somebody else.
And that is why the median income with just a high school degree is $20 an hour and not the $45 an hour that a plumber that owns their own business has.
As for the other jobs you described chefs top out around 20 an hour except for a handful of celebrities, the median income for a barber is around $17 an hour and yes garbage collectors can make good money but that's because it's really shitty work and really hard work and you need a CDL for it and that means you have to stay clean as a fucking whistle.
So no factually you are wrong. Why the hell do you think blue collar workers are so pissed off about immigrants? It's because there isn't enough work to go around for them. They know it so I'm not sure why you don't.
Re: Bullshit (Score:2)
Right, nobody got those jobs by developing skills, they just "blundered into them".
The College Board is awful (Score:2)
Terrible tests that distort learning.
High costs.
Incompetence.
Deals with schools to milk more money out of students.
Naive (Score:3)
The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly
Thinking that paying your executives a lot of money will guarantee a well run organization is as naive as thinking that grades are a guarantee of intelligence.
Re:Naive (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, high salaries for execs suggests that the organization is run by people who are far more interested in money than in the organization's mission. Money, and only money.
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It's because they just have too much money. They're a non-profit, and they're making tons of profit off students every year. So much so they don't know what to spend their money on.
They could give everyone a huge raise from the CEO to the janitor and they'd still have money coming out of every corner than they have to spend on their luxury hotels and other things they own.
We swear (Score:2)
This thing usually works!
ACT? IB? (Score:2, Interesting)
When I was applying to college I took both the SAT and the ACT (just in case). Although I didn't take any IB courses, I knew people who did. I just took AP classes... up until I figured out that I could take the test without wasting my time taking the actual class. Another thing I didn't figure out until much later was I could have taken more community college classes (either concurrently during the school year, or in the summer) and used that to get more transferable college credit when I went to a 4 ye
Re:the fuck is this crap (Score:4, Insightful)
It's cheaper.
They don't need to secure the paper test materials anymore to prevent someone from leaking a copy of the test and invalidating a whole season's worth of test results.
No more scan-trons to process for scoring, so they don't need purchase, scan, and then dispose of the answer sheets.
They can enable things like adaptive tests, which theoretically results in a more representative scoring (assuming you didn't flub your first couple of questions badly). This also has the side benefit of making the questions being used per participant possibly different, which makes organized cheating more difficult (it is harder to send a group of ringers in to take the test and then regurgitate the questions and answer choices after the test to reconstruct the entire test). It also means they can probably keep using the same question pools for longer.
Basically, the College Board can make more money per session while running more students through testing sessions... which means more money.
They're not the only ones.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages... [pbs.org]
There are also smaller testers that exist, like PSI:
https://www.psiexams.com/ [psiexams.com]
Basically, it all boils down to money.
The Actual Psych test. (Score:2)
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students.
In related news, a new type of psychological test was deployed last week on Psychology students..
Pencil-and-paper days had problems too (Score:1)
In the previous century, back in the paper-and-number-2-pencil days, there were logistical problems with standardized tests.
Usually they were things like a natural disaster or a power failure/HVAC outage or other issue at a the testing center. These kinds of issues were "well known" and the College Board had backup plans.
student loan bankruptcy is needed to fix the Colle (Score:2)
student loan bankruptcy is needed to fix the College system.
Way to much high paid admin boat driving costs up.
How can I make this AI's fault? (Score:1)
Isn't AI the root cause of every screw up, because by definition humans are perfect and can't screw up in ways that AI does?
And to the someone who complained of AI ripping off computer books, how long will those books remain relevant anyhow? Just how short-term is your horizon? What if you had a basic income and didn't need college?
Yeah okay (Score:2)
Back in 1997 I took a computerized SAT at a Prometric site on account of someone thought I was smart enough for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Spoiler alert: I wasn't on account of being a kid and not having it all click in my head yet.
Other spoiler alert: computerized SATs were a thing almost 30 years ago, back when you could say "computerized" with a straight face.
same arguments against electronic voting canbeused (Score:2)
2. who sets the rules for how the electronic system?
3. If someone has their finger on the scale, how would YOU know
This takes all agency out of the hands of the academic administrators and places it into the hands of the service provider. Like Microsoft/CrowdStrike. The academics have sold out their responsibility for a low low monthly SAAS fee. Shift the blame.
Managers everywhere love this. They do less, and push the work and liability out to the service
Whew. (Score:2)
Thanks God I took SAT the old school paper method! I think I did it thrice too excluding PSAT.
Pretty average executive compensation (Score:2)
Average starting executive compensation is north of $300k usually with like a 30% bonus, and goes up from there. 700k sounds like a lot but they've probably been there more than 5 years and what they've built is cash flow positive. If you include health insurance, expenses account, company car etc you could easily tack on another $200k to the total comp.