Why don't they try and develop a model that takes into account that students will study directly against the test?<p>The current model seems to rely on what could be called "security by obscurity". Of course students shouldn't be able to spend hours analysing a single text before the test, but if you publish a corpus of 200 texts, then anyone who read and analysed them thoroughly before the test aren't really cheating anymore, they are just educating themselves.
Saw an interesting proposal on HN a few months ago WRT entrance exams:<p><i>My university just allows anyone into first semester, but then has quite hard courses and exams there already – by the end of the second semester, 90% have already failed.<p>That’s another way to solve the >10x applicants issue.</i><p>Seems like a great way to reduce administrative overhead, judge based on merit, and get students to realistically self-select a college (if you don't, you waste a semester and the associated costs). Problem is that the exams select only for people that are good at taking exams - not always the most interesting/well rounded students.
> We’re working against cartel-like companies in China and other countries that will stop at nothing to enrich themselves,<p>That's how I felt about College Board.
The bottom line... with rampant cheating on standardized tests, fabricated school records, and massive "assistance" in college applications, it has become almost impossible to accurately measure the merit of most applicants from east asia.<p>First order effects arising from this are not that big a deal, those students will either wash out in in the university setting, or will end up cheating their way through school to the degree that they will be useless to many employers afterwards. The bigger issues is that, whether due to malice or not, schools have limited enrollment spots and people who try to "play fair" will be left at a disadvantage. Some might say that this is not all bad; that it prepares students for the real world. But I would like to think that we want to protect our culture/society from devolving into the sort of low trust free for all that exists in some other parts of the world. Anecdotally I've heard that this shift has already started to permeate our universities, where many students feel immense pressure to cheat because so many other people are doing it.<p>I'd be lying if I said that this didn't have a big effect on the way I view recent east asian immigrants in the workforce. Let you say I'm xenophobic, "recent east asian immigrant" would accurately describe many people in my family and social circles, and if I didn't open my mouth, the average bystander might assume I would be in that category as well.<p>The college board and individual colleges are not exactly innocent bystanders in all of this, and I'm glad I got through the system before these issues became acute, but I feel really badly for students from anywhere who actually play by the rules.
If a test is this easy to game, perhaps it's not a very good test.<p>Does Math and Language really correlate to ability? We know the answer is no. We sent humans into space, we can do better.
Has IBM/Google/etc attempted to plug Watson or any of the other advanced knowledge AIs into the SAT/ACT yet? I would be curious to know if they could consistently score a "high" score on tests without having previously seen the material (obviously excluding the essay portion).
As a society we should totally rethink how we handle children.<p>Employment is as personal and customizable as ever, but we increasingly treat kinds not even as blue-collar workers but as poultry on industrial farm.<p>Stick them in cage with artificial light, force feed with unnatural excuse for knowledge, disregard their personality, rank on how good they pass tests (we weight poultry at this point)