Why Not Boycott the SAT?
6 min read
A few weeks back, I left a comment on the Students20h blog in response to an a post written describing a student's thoughts on the college admissions process. The gist of my comment was that college is but a part of actual learning, and that where you go to college offers as many opportunities about where and how you want to live as it provides opportunities on where, how, and what you want to learn. In my comment, I dropped an aside about how I'd love to see an entire class of students -- nationwide -- boycott the SATs and the APs. Without the SATs and the APs, my reasoning (if you can call it that :) ) went, colleges would need to find a different method to evaluate applicants, because the overwhelming majority of colleges would be dead in the water without new tuition revenue.
I've had this idea for a while -- probably for over a decade -- and it always rattled around as something that is easy to say because it is easily dismissable. Clay Burell mentioned it in a blog post, and it landed with a faintly audible thud. This doesn't surprise me, because finding a better tool than the SAT and AP classes is a goal that many people would like to see achieved (a de-emphasis on testing) but that most people believe will never happen, at least without top-down change. Also, as I see it, we are looking at a testing beast with at least three heads: The PSAT, the SAT, and the AP. All of these heads attach to the College Board.
We'll be waiting a long time for top-down change to occur on this one, as there is no incentive for anybody to change anything. The College Board brings in good money via testing fees, and I'll do some napkin math on this in the next couple paragraphs. Colleges are comfortable using SAT and AP numbers in their admissions process for a variety of reasons, and change is both expensive and inconvenient. The US Federal Budget included a request for an additional $90 million dollars (on top of $32 million in 2006) for fiscal year 2007 and 2008 to expand the AP program. As you can see from the enacted budgets (an excel download of the 2007 budget is here, and the AP is line 195; an Excel download for 2008 is here, with the AP on line 212) the increases were more modest (an increase of $5 million in 2007, and of $6.5 million in 2008, to a total of $43.5 million), but the implication of the repeated $90 million increased spending request is clear: a standardized test -- in this case, the AP -- will provide evidence of student learning. In turn, this increased emphasis on AP courses is a nice windfall for those in the business of selling curriculum, as this federal money guarantees that school districts will have the need to buy AP curriculum and train teachers in its use.
Which brings us to some napkin math on testing fees: According to the College Board, an estimated 2.7 million students graduated high school in 2006. I wasn't able to get good numbers on the number of students who take the SAT more than once in the hopes of increasing their score, and therefore pay multiple testing fees, so for the sake of this rough estimate we will assume that 2.5 million students took the SAT. According to the College Board SAT FAQ page, the cost to take the SAT is $43.00. So, 2.5 million students taking the SAT would gross $107.5 million.
For the PSAT, I was not able to find good numbers on total number of students talking the test. However, the relationship between the PSAT and the National Merit Scholarship awards is clearly identified on the College Board web site, and this seems to be one of the prime motivating factors to take the test. So, in the interest of estimating low, let's assume that half of the 2.7 million graduating students took the PSAT at least once -- and it's worth noting that some students take the PSAT multiple times, some starting in the eighth grade. But, to generate a low (and therefore reliably uninflated) number, let's assume that 1.35 million students pay 13.00 to take the test. This would gross $17,550,000.00
Moving on to the AP, according to this article in the Austin Daily Texan, "(a)bout 610,000 of the roughly 2.7 million members of the class of 2005 took a total of 1.5 million AP tests." Each AP test costs 84.00 to take (according to the College Board, much of the expense is caused by the increased cost of scoring the AP relative to the SAT), so 1.5 million tests at 84.00 apiece grosses $126 million.
So, a low-end estimate of the gross from the tests is $107.5 million for the SAT, $17.55 million for the PSAT, and $126 million for the AP, for approximately $245.55 million dollars for one year. And these testing fees are completely independent of the different trainings offered for teachers, all with registration fees. And the numbers I generated above also do not take into account any revenue generated from selling test prep info to students directly.
Of course, other people besides the College Board are willing to teach you how to take that test. According to a Business Week article from February, 2005, test prep companies brought in "an estimated $702 million in 2003, and that's expected to grow to $960 million" in 2004. I wasn't able to find current estimates for 2005 through 2007, but I'd love to see them if anyone has them -- please leave them in the comments.
So here is my unrealistic dream. It will never happen, but it is incredibly fun to imagine.
Imagine an empty room on the Saturday allotted for the SATs. Imagine parents not spending over a thousand dollars on a SAT prep course. Imagine students outside, playing sports, doing theater, hanging out, doing just about anything rather than wasting time on SAT review questions. Imagine what could be done if the money earmarked for testing, curriculum to support testing, infrastructure to deliver tests, etc, could be spent differently.
When I was still teaching, I would run this idea past a class occasionally. Not surprisingly, the students generally got a kick out of it. It wasn't what they expected a teacher to say, for one thing. And most of the students came back to this place, more or less: "It would only work if everybody did it, and we couldn't trust everybody to do it." That, and "Our parents would kill us." I always expected a parent phone call after dropping this idea out there, but I never got one. The thing that was fun about these conversations, though, was that usually, a few days after the conversation, a kid would come into my office wanting to talk about it, and excited about the possibility that something like this just might work.
I know it will never happen. But just think about the possibilities if it could.
