As students finish their final year of high school, many will look back on their painful and expensive relationship with the College Board. But, this article is not about how the Collegeboard capitalizes on teenager’s anxiety, how it forces many students to overwork themselves, or even how it enforces the status quo. This article is about a much more pressing matter: how the College Board is a fraud. This all started in 1999 when the Collegeboard recruited Gaston Caperton to transform the non-profit company into a thriving business. Although Caperton initially claimed he did not want to work for a “testing company,” his introduction to the organization would change the platform of College Admissions forever. Prices to take the College Board's tests skyrocketed, and students-- with nowhere else to turn-- were forced to pay the lucrative fees required to take the company’s test.
Rather suspiciously, after Caperton took leadership for the company, the “nonprofit” organization suddenly started paying their CEO and other board members up to $1.3 million dollars. That same year, Collegeboard surprisingly gained ownership to a large market share of the test preparation industry, with portions of revenue from test prep centers and publishing companies going straight to the Collegeboard.
But it gets worse. Collegeboard usually profits around $60 million dollars every year. Yes, Collegeboard is profiting, not making, profiting $60 million dollars-before it pays its executives- after it claims to be a nonprofit company. And 10 percent of that money they make comes from name selling. What is name selling? You know that last part of a scantron in the PSAT and ACT where students can write their emails to get letters from colleges? CollegeBoard sells that information in addition to other personal information gained from filling out your scantron to other organizations and colleges. If you think that’s messed up, you are not the only one. In 2010, a class action lawsuit was filed against the Collegeboard for this malpractice with multiple state representatives supporting the lawsuit. Yet, the Collegeboard still lives on, profiting off its monopoly on a student’s path to success.
On top of all of these fraudulent actions, the Collegeboard, which preaches “testing equality for everyone,” seems to be doing the exact opposite. The SAT was written in 1920 by Carl Brigham, a eugenicist inspired by Social Darwinist principle who believed the SAT would prove his theory that people of color are less intelligent. An almost bitter truth is that the SAT may be fulfilling this eugenicist principle in the 21st century with there being stark contrasts in average scores between races.
Finally, although there is enough legitimacy to the argument that standardized testing will always favor the wealthy, the College Board seems rather apathetic to the problems it can fix for lower income students. Maybe instead of having executives split up and pocket $60 million dollars (claiming it is company salary to avoid claims that the Collegeboard actually is not nonprofit), the College Board could offer lower prices to students who because of low family income, cannot afford to take the SAT multiple times. Standardized test preparation material could be distributed for free, fines for signing up late for the SAT could be less severe. All of these are simple fixes that the Collegeboard is not willing to do.
The College Board is a rather suspicious company. It claims to be nonprofit when in fact it generates large amounts of revenue, it sells students’ names and personal information, and it does not seem to put any effort in making testing “equal.” These money-minded malpractices are a slippery slope to many more abuses of power in the future if Collegeboard is not forced to change.
