Many parents and high school students were in an uproar this summer after the SAT results arrived. It seems that the composite scores for the June exam date were markedly low compared to previous dates, nationwide. College Board released a statement explaining that the scoring reflecting the fact that the June version of the exam was easier than others.
SCORING THE SAT
The SAT is scored on a 1600 scale, comprised of a Math Section and a Reading and Writing Section worth 200-800 points each. Students do not receive a raw score calculated based on percentage of correctly answered questions. Instead, College Board uses an equating system to allot scores that account for varying degrees of test difficulty. This is because some SAT tests might contain questions of higher or lower difficulty than others. The sum of difficulty across all questions in a given version of the SAT equals the test version overall difficulty. So the equating process ensures that students who take an easier version of the SAT do not have an advantage over students who take an overall harder version.
Students who test on the same date are arranged by difficulty percentile. Then their scores are categorized onto a scoring scale containing SAT versions from all dates and difficulty levels. The result are scores that factor in not only your child’s individual performance, but also the difficulty level of the specific test version they take, as well as the performance of their cohort against the data mine of College Board.
WHY THE OUTRAGE?
Some felt that this grading technique caused vast amounts of variability on the June SAT scoring. Whereas missing one math question might have equated to a 790 in January of 2017, the result was a 750 in June. Parents claimed that such points deficits can have detrimental effects on their child’s college applications, and the inconsistency proved troubling to many. Another argument suggests that the College Board is competing against the ACT in the marketplace, and used this scoring technique in order to thin out the amount of students who score highly. This makes a high SAT score more rare and thus more valuable. Compare this to the alleged high amounts of students who score well on the ACT, thereby diluting the value of the score.
VERDICT: SCORING WAS FAIR
The College Board released a statement addressing the outrage in July. “While we plan for consistency across administrations, on occasion there are some tests that can be easier or more difficult than usual. That is why we use a statistical process called equating. The equating process ensures fairness for all students.” It seems, then, that the outrage is unfounded.
