Almost 30 years ago, the College Board (CB) created a controversy when it decided to “recenter” SAT scores, which looked like a way of trying to hide poor performance by politically influential groups. In the years since, the CB has done more things that smell of what we used to call political correctness, now “wokeness.”
The CB is back at it, as Richard Phelps explains in today’s Martin Center article.
He writes, “Now, College Board is ‘recalibrating’ some Advanced Placement (AP) exam scales and eliciting similar reactions from critics. College Board invokes a desire to make score distributions similar across AP exams, just as they crafted similar distributions for the verbal and math SAT subtests in 1995-96.”
Phelps is skeptical about the claim that this will make the tests more useful, but he thinks there is something to the argument that this is a profit-maximizing move in that more students might be drawn into taking the AP placement exams that provide much of the CB’s revenue.
Read the whole thing.