College Board Will Postpone At-Home SAT
Amid concerns over security and access, the organization backed down from plans to offer an at-home digital version of SAT this fall.
On Tuesday, the College Board announced that plans for a digitally delivered at-home SAT would be postponed. Access to a reliable internet signal was cited as the key concern, as students would need to videoconference with a proctor for over three hours to complete the exam. School-based digital administrations, an innovation introduced in 2019, would still occur this fall. And a January SAT test date might be added, pending demand.
The organization administered digital, at-home versions of AP tests last month, which many viewed as the trial run for an at-home SAT. Despite College Board’s public celebration of the at-home AP program’s success, critics have found much to lament. First there was the requirement that some students take their exams in odd hours, including the middle of the night; then a group of students filed a lawsuit over the AP software’s inability to accept some image file formats (e.g,. HEIC) as a record of students’ responses.
In its press release about the future of the at-home SAT, the College board placed a larger focus on its call for colleges to be more flexible in requirements for applicants this fall – namely, for colleges to defer early admission deadlines and not penalize students who are unable to submit test scores. This is a significant gesture for an organization that develops and administers standardized tests. It reveals the intense internal and external pressure College Board is under to research and develop new, effective platforms for SAT and respond to critics who claim that unequal access to high-speed internet could exacerbate existing inequities. (There have also been festering concerns around test security.)
The story on an at-home SAT is far from over. The College Board made clear it’s still developing a remote proctoring solution (it’s presumably unimpressed with ProctorU, used by GRE) and might deploy an at-home test at some point in the future. It just won’t be ready by the fall.
