Agreed. This statement in particular:
Those students who met the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark had a number of critically important academic characteristics that must be shared by all students if our nation is to make meaningful gains in educational attainment.
students?
REALLY??And yes, as I said before, they're clearly pushing the PSAT, and they're also pushing AP participation, which would increase the pool of AP test takers, so there's definitely a profit motive here.
However...
It's also worth considering that, as the providers of these products, they're uniquely positioned to analyze data related to them, and some of the results are quite interesting, and yes, even worthy of alarm, as the Atlantic article suggested.
For instance:
The College Board’s 2013 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness reveals that only 43 percent of SAT takers in the class of 2013 met the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark.
If we generalize the population of SAT test takers as those students with college aspirations, it's a question worth asking... why are the majority of students who are interested in attending college not fully prepared?
I'd be interested to see the data, though, because a lot of students take it early in their junior year, just to get a baseline. I think they'd need to filter out early takers (unless they pass) and re-testers in order for the data to be useful.
Last year alone, more than 300,000 students in the
graduating class of 2012 who had been identified as having the potential to succeed in an AP course did not take one.
It's easy to see the dollar signs from The College Board's perspective here, because that's a lot of potential customers that never walked in the door.
But it does seem to be a problem, too. If all of these students were identified as capable of AP work, and assuming the classes were available, why didn't they take them? I'd like to see a follow-up survey for a randomly-selected few thousand of them, to see what that data tells us.
