High school students across the nation and in our area are demanding the College Board rescore the June SAT, saying they feel their scores were unfairly low.
When Dominique Terrell, a rising senior at St. James High School, took the SAT in June she got 15 more questions right than when she took it in November. But her score barely went up.
“In my math section alone I got five or six more questions right,” Terrell said, “And my score didn’t change at all. It stayed at a 570 for math.”
The problem isn’t that the SAT was too hard. It was too easy.
College Board explains that because the June version of the test was easier than others, more points were taken off for wrong answers to make the scores comparable to previous versions.
They call this equating, saying in-part in a statement on Twitter:
“Equating makes sure that a score for a test taken on one date is equivalent to a score from another date. So, for example, a single incorrect answer on one test could equal two or three incorrect answers on a more difficult version.”
Terrell has been tutoring for months with St. James A.P. teacher Ginger Frick. “It’s impacted all the students, high, low, middle, everything,” Frick said.
Their scores were lower than previous exams, even though they missed the same number of questions or fewer.
“When you see people improve and they don’t get rewarded, that is frustrating,” Frick said. “Because these students are trying to get better, and they did get better, and nothing happened.”
Now kids are scrambling to figure out whether they should retake the test.
“It’s the difference between scholarships, colleges, that type of thing,” Terrell said.
Though some students will have the opportunity to retake the test, for some rising seniors that was their last chance.
An online petition calling for College Board to rescore the June SAT has more than 18,000 signatures.
The company said Friday it will not rescore the exam.