The New York-based College Board, the owner of the SAT college entrance exam, said that it will tighten their security measures after the incidents of cheating and test-stealing the previous years.
According to the Reuters, part of the measures the board will be taking will include reducing the number of times the test is given outside the United States and adding more numbers of auditing test centers. The College Board said in a statement this week that the efforts will be invested on the "most robust and direct actions taken by a college exam provider".
They also said that the names of the people who are involved in cheating will be submitted to the government agencies in the US and across the world, according to UPI. But they also said that they will just continue reusing the test forms overseas that were already used in the US.
As reported last year, the College Board failed to take the security issues under control. What was happening was that the Asian companies collect the questions from the previous years' exams and give these to their clients as practice materials. These questions would then reflect on SAT exams conducted overseas, which is definitely an unfair practice.
So the company said that they will have more test center audits done worldwide. This way, it will be a lot easier for students as well as educators to report cheating incidents. But there are critics who would say that these steps will not be enough, and that the questions should not be reused.
Bob Schaeffer, education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said that is it not enough to reduce the reusing of the questions, because with the help of technology and social media, the spread of test questions will be impossible to prevent, and the only way is to really stop using the same test questions.
