The College Board announced on April 15 that the SAT scheduled for June 6 would be canceled.
Early summer SAT is typically taken by high school juniors who use this early opportunity to start preparing for college applications. It is estimated that 1 million high school students have been affected by the cancellations.
“Our first principle with the SAT and all our work must be to keep families and students safe,” College Board chief executive David Coleman said in a statement. “The second principle is to make the SAT as widely available as possible for students who wish to test, regardless of the economic or public health circumstances.”
The College Board also stated that it would consider transitioning to a digital SAT to take at home in the unlikely event the schools would not reopen in the fall.
In the meantime, Advanced Placement tests in specialized subjects such as history, calculus, English, will be offered in May and June to take at home. These tests will be open-book, no multiple-choice questions, and requiring a written response. Approximately 3 million students will take AP exams this spring.
The possibility of offering SAT to take at home raises various concerns, ranging from the security and validity of the results to the issue of inequality. Students from low-income families may not have the required access to computers and Internet.
The College Board pledged to ensure that at-home SAT testing “is simple; secure and fair; accessible to all; and valid for use in college admissions.” The organization said it has been using digital versions of the SAT in several states and districts: “While the idea of at-home SAT testing is new, digital delivery of the test is not. If this was four years ago, we could not make this commitment. The technology was not there,” said Jeremy Singer, president of the College Board, referring to recent advances in remote proctoring and online testing that make an at-home exam possible.
While most colleges and universities nationwide joined the motion to waive standardized test requirement in the midst of the pandemic, eight Ivy League universities continue to require scores, explaining that juniors preparing applications for 2021 admissions will have many more opportunities to take the tests after the quarantine is over. It is also quite clear that standardized test scores remain among the key criteria for merit-based scholarships.
