Daily Archives: 2025-05-23

College Board keeps apologizing for screwing up digital SAT and AP tests

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ed Tech is always such a shitshow. The customers aren't the users, the vendors DGAF because they're mostly compulsory and/or monopolies, the vendors are usually run by carpetbaggers, the sites aren't generally well equipped for the correlated load for this kind of testing, everyone up and down the chain believes in weird security theater woo...

Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board—it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation.

Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.

Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together.

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