(Eric Hoover for The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Tara Miller gets a lot of paper cuts. It’s a hazard of handling hundreds of answer sheets and packing them into boxes, which she has done many times over the past 15 years.
Miller, a college counselor at Stephen F. Austin High School, in Austin, Tex., helps keep the wheels of the standardized-testing process turning. Month after month, exam after exam, legions of school counselors, teachers, and staff members do the grunt work that allows high-school students to bubble in answers on the ACT and SAT.
Depending on when the exams are given, that work is done for little or no money. School staff who proctor college-entrance exams during school hours don’t get paid for it; those who supervise the same tests on weekends are generally paid around $100 for several hours of work.
Standardized testing, as The Chronicle described in a recent article, is an elaborate bargain in which colleges, students, and test companies all get something important. But the high-school employees largely responsible for making the exams happen have a more ambiguous stake in the whole deal.
A school’s time and resources are precious, and that’s exactly what hours of standardized-testing demand. In a world in which some schools have greater resources than others, where testing happens has potential college-access implications. Especially right now.
The novel coronavirus has complicated the testing bargain. In many areas hit hard by Covid-19, high schools will be closed this fall and unable to host college-entrance exams, meaning that a widespread shortage of testing sites will probably continue. Elsewhere, educators are trying to determine how, or if, they can safely administer the ACT and SAT during a raging pandemic. As an uncertain school year approaches, well-resourced high schools are scrambling to provide ACTs and SATs to their students, while many teens who need test scores for scholarships can’t find a place to take them for the first time.
Logistical challenges are entwining with ethical concerns. How should schools and families weigh the value of a test score against the health risks of sitting for an exam?
The question now looms over many high-school counselors like Miller, who devotes a great deal of time and sweat to a testing ritual that’s as relentless as it is disruptive. Each year, her school administers the PSAT to underclassmen on a school day in October, during which seniors can’t be on the campus. In March, the SAT eats up another school day. In May, Advanced Placement testing lasts for 10 days, shutting down the gym and library. Then there’s the Texas Success Initiative exams, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams, and Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System. Sometimes, the school is randomly selected to administer National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, too.
On big testing days, Miller says, “it’s as if a tsunami has come through — it stops the life of the school.”
Last March, before the SAT, Miller closed the college-and-career center so that she could focus on sorting test booklets and answer sheets into stacks of 25. The day of the exam, about a quarter of 500 test takers received testing accommodations — extended time, testing in a separate room, and so on; proctors for each group had to be given specific instructions. After the exam, Miller and her colleagues counted all the testing materials, packed them into boxes, and shipped the heavy freight off via UPS.
Miller, widely known as a compassionate counselor, does many things beyond her job description to help her students. She doesn’t really mind the paper cuts. But she worries that all the hours high-school staffs devote to college-entrance exams take a toll. “There’s a ridiculous amount of free labor that we have to give to these testing companies,” she says. That takes time away from engaging with students in meaningful ways that can make or break a college trajectory.”
One day of testing requires weeks or months of planning. Adam Lindley, a college counselor at St. Francis High School, in Wheaton, Ill., starts prepping in mid-August for AP exams the following May. First, he reserves all the necessary rooms. Later, he tackles clerical chores, like creating spreadsheets and ensuring that students are registered for each exam they planned to take. If five students require five different testing accommodations, the school must find five proctors to assist each student.
“Once the test is paid for,” Lindley says, “all the responsibility falls to high schools.”
At a given test site on exam day, proctors must brace for mishaps. A student who vomits, a fire alarm that goes off. On several occasions, gaggles of honking geese have descended on Lindley’s school while he was proctoring the ACT. Each time he ran outside and waved a clipboard at the birds, attempting to shoo them away. It’s the kind of irregularity that schools are required to report to testing organizations.
Traditionally, high-school students took the ACT or SAT at designated testing sites, usually high schools, on Saturdays (a.k.a. “national testing dates”). Then, two decades ago, the ACT introduced its District Testing option, enabling students to take its exam during school hours. Year later, the College Board started the SAT School Day program, which has since allowed more than 3.7 million students to take the SAT in their schools during the week. Both organizations describe weekday exams — paid for by schools and districts — as ways to expand testing access to students who do not get it otherwise.
Covid-19 prevented Lindley’s school from administering the ACT to its juniors during a school day this spring. Though it hadn’t planned to offer the exam in the fall, there is considerable pressure to do so. The ACT has been urging schools to offer the exam to help seniors who might not have taken it (“Time is Running Out!” one email solicitation says). And some parents are urging the school to administer the exam in September.
“They’re like, ‘You need to offer the test, or I’ll have to drive two or three hours to Indiana so my son or daughter can get a test score,’” Lindley says. “But right now, Covid-19 cases are going up again, we’re trying to work on scheduling just to get kids in the building, and I don’t know if fall sports are going to happen.”
At the Loomis Chaffee School, a boarding school in Windsor, Conn., officials have developed intricate Covid-19 precautions for the fall. But ensuring safe test-day conditions in a room full of socially distancing students is tricky.
“We’re having difficult conversations about air-conditioning,” says David Rion, director of college guidance. “Not turning on the AC is a problem. But if we turn on the AC, does that push the virus around the room?”
This fall, Loomis will be an “unlisted test center” for the ACT. That little-known option allows approved schools to give the exam on a Saturday — to its students only. Normally, when a school administers the ACT on a national testing day, registration is open to any student, anywhere. An “unlisted” testing site essentially offers a school the comfort and convenience of an in-school exam without the missed class time.
The ACT has allowed schools to become unlisted test centers for more than two decades. Typically, there are about 30 such sites in a given year, according to the organization. This fall, there will be about 150. “Similar to national testing this spring and summer, our state and district testing was impacted by COVID-19, and some schools that would normally test as part of the state and district model are using this option to test their own students” a spokeswoman for the ACT wrote in an email. “Many of these schools have moved to online learning and may have restrictions on who can enter the school buildings due to COVID-19.”
Rion has tried unsuccessfully to get permission from the College Board to offer the SAT in-house to its students on a Saturday as well. “There’s a moral argument that we owe it to our local community to open up the test to whoever wants to come, but we’re also concerned about the safety of letting people in,” he says. “This year, we wanted to be a closed testing site just because of the virus. And our area, which has some big testing centers, isn’t usually crunched for seats.”
According to the ACT’s Unlisted Test Center Establishment Form, participating schools — and not the testing organization — are “responsible for all costs,” including proctors. Students register for an unlisted exam by inputting a code unique to their school and paying their fee. An unlisted school won’t appear in the ACT’s online list of available test centers.
That concerns Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). At a time when many students still haven’t been able to take a single college-entrance exam, some lucky students have options that many others don’t. “This literally allows for creating secret societies of advantage,” he says. “If a private school gets approved as an unlisted test site, then it’s basically giving this secret test at a time when many public schools are now closed. It’s creating access to tests that many others probably can’t create.”
Bello sees a larger truth about the inequities of the testing bargain in that example. “How good is a system in which all of this work depends on schools?” he says. “The most-resourced schools are the ones that do best here, creating the best testing environments, providing the best opportunities, and ensuring that there are left-handed desks for all the left-handed students. These are the same schools that can afford to pay proctors for private exams. These are inequities.”
Many students who’ve already got a test score feel a need to get another one. Camille Phares, a rising high-school senior in Austin, took the SAT in the spring, but she hadn’t really prepared. “I was focused on making good grades,” she says, “I didn’t want to take time out of my day to do test prep.”
Unhappy with her SAT score, Phares took two ACT courses this summer, completing practice tests while wearing a mask — two, actually — to simulate Covid-19-era testing conditions. She registered for the July 18 ACT, but the nearest testing site she could find was a high school in Houston, about 165 miles away.
On the Friday before the test, Phares and her father made the three-hour drive, ate Domino’s pizza for dinner, and stayed in a Holiday Inn Express. But the next morning, when she arrived at the school, the doors were locked. A dozen or so students were standing around, clutching their testing admission tickets, snacks, water bottles, and pencils.
Finally, a man who worked at the school showed up. He told the small crowd of families that no one at the school knew that they were supposed to administer the ACT that day — there would be no exam. It was just one baffling example of how an industry dependent on high-school cooperation is, at least temporarily, breaking down.
Phares and her father drove home. When she walked into her bedroom and saw the pages of ACT practice materials still scattered on the floor, she says, “I was like ‘Dang! I spent so much time on this.’ I felt disappointed, defeated.”
She plans to try once more to take the ACT, as long as she can find a place to do so in Austin. It won’t be at her own high school, though.
That’s because Stephen F. Austin High School — where Miller, the counselor, works — doesn’t offer the ACT during the school day. Moreover, the school announced this spring that it would stop offering weekend ACT and SAT testing during the 2020-21 school year. The school’s message to students and parents said “student equity and health were the major determining factors” in its decision.
Miller hopes more high schools will follow suit. If that happens, she believes, some of the same schools that have long propped up the testing industry can help de-emphasize the role of standardized tests, especially during a time when many colleges are dropping their ACT and SAT requirements.
Yes, Miller has worried that shutting down weekend testing at her school might make it harder for students attending other high schools to find a place to test this fall, but she didn’t want her school to bear the burden of testing during an uncertain fall. No test site, she believes, should remain open during a pandemic.
Moreover, Miller sees an important principle at stake: “If we’re always relying on colleges and testing companies to to set the tone, then we’re always going to be doing what’s best for them, and not for students.”
The perspectives of counselors vary from place to place. After all, the testing culture in one school might not look anything like the testing culture in another.
At Austin High, 98 percent of rising seniors have an official SAT score.
At Hastings High School, in Hastings, Mich., apparently no seniors do: The Class of 2021 was supposed to take the SAT during the school day in April, but it was canceled because of Covid-19.
“Normally, my students are lucky if they test one time,” says Cathy Longstreet, a high-school counselor there. “I feel like my seniors were already behind, and then that gap just got a little bigger. They very much count on that one test in April.”
This summer, Longstreet has read news reports about students traveling great distances to take standardized tests. In her rural community, she says, nobody was even thinking of doing that. Many families there lack the resources for a testing road trip. Recently, the counselor spoke with a mother who said that paying a $5 summer-school fee would mean her family couldn’t afford to eat that night.
Hastings High is scheduled to administer the SAT during a school day in September, but that might not happen. Recently, amid a rise in coronavirus cases, Michigan ordered bars to close, a reminder that plans for in-person instruction this fall are no sure thing.
Longstreet has mixed feelings about standardized tests. On the one hand, she wants her seniors to have a score just like other soon-to-be college applicants do, especially because some institutions still require an ACT or SAT for scholarships.
But she knows that many of her students, after several uncertain months away from school, will be anxious: “I don’t even know how valid that test score will be. With all of the things going on in their lives, how is that going to be a relevant score?”
For years, Longstreet has been in charge of testing at her school. That means ordering the exams, planning each testing day, and rearranging classrooms according to the College Board’s test-day mandates.
Last year, Longstreet and Erin Bargo, a brand-new counselor at her school, stayed late the evening before the PSAT to ensure that all test takers would be seated in straight, evenly spaced rows, facing the clock. They used a yardstick to measure the distance between desks: The middle of one, the testing organization’s rules says, must be three feet from the middle of another.
At one point, Longstreet turned to her younger colleague. “I bet you didn’t realize that as a school counselor,” she said, “you’d be spending so much time moving around desks.”
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
