1979 saw the enactment of the Truth-in-Testing Law in New York state, which required standardized tests to release exactly half of the administered exams’ questions and answers. For this reason, only six of the seven test dates for the ACT were available in New York (because the ACT only released the questions and answers for 3 of their seven test dates).
There was a time, not too long ago (two years ago, to be exact), when students could get a copy of the SAT they took. At that time, the SAT was offered seven times per year, and the score was released every March, May, and October to the students who tested those months and paid a couple of extra bucks. The Question-and-Answer Service (QAS), as it was called, gave students an opportunity to learn from the mistakes they made on test day.
With the advent of the digital SAT came the end of the QAS. How is this possible? The College Board has cited test security and intellectual property as reasons. Why were test security and intellectual property not cited earlier? Is the College Board simply increasing their bottom line by reusing old questions?
What the College Board does release now are student performance on very general categories tested. This is useless. Why? Because when a student underperforms on Conventions of Standard English, the student does not know if his/her weakness is subject-verb agreement, verb tense, pronoun-antecedent agreement, commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, or apostrophes. From a preparation standpoint, the practice tests are much more valuable.
Hopefully we hit a tipping point in the not-so-distant future where juggernauts like the College Board (and universities) look out for the best interests of students (as they purport to) rather than their bottom lines.
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