- A software glitch caused the March 8th SAT to auto-submit prematurely, impacting many students in the US and abroad.
- The issue primarily affected students at sites that started slowly and/or students who receive extended time accommodations. It occurred during the Math section which comes last.
- College Board’s proposed remedies require trade-offs that don’t need to be required. A chorus of voices is advocating for more appropriate and common-sense alternatives.
- This post explains what happened and what students should know about makeup exams, refunds, and retake vouchers.
- We also discuss how score choice, self-reporting, and super scoring policies factor into a student’s decision to keep or cancel their March 8th score.
Almost 200,000 students around the globe took the March 8th SAT. What those students did not know was that there was a ticking software bomb in the Bluebook app that delivers the digital SAT. The glitch meant that under certain circumstances, a student’s test would be submitted at exactly 11:00 a.m., whether the student had finished the exam or not.
The error gradually made its way around the world. Students reported the problem in Australia, Vietnam, and Pakistan as early as midnight Eastern time, eight hours before test takers in the U.S. had even started their exams. College Board made an attempt to notify site administrators via email of the slow moving disaster, but that message was often seen too late, and the fix—rebooting the app and logging back into the exam—created its own level of chaos. The Bluebook’s testing timer is unstoppable once set in motion, so there was no opportunity for proctors to pause the exam or add back time lost to reboots.
The vulnerability seems to have impacted students who arrived at the test site already logged into the Bluebook app, which is also the practice test environment for the SAT. The standard-length test, including the 10-minute break, lasts for 2 hours and 24 minutes, so testing rooms that started by 8:36 a.m. avoided the glitch. Students with later starts or who were testing with special accommodations that included extended time were not as fortunate. The Reading and Writing (R/W) portion of the SAT is always first, so except in extremely unusual circumstances, the impact was limited to the Math section.
College Board’s initial attempt at damage control has been inadequate as of the time of this post. We remain optimistic that revisions will be made and will update this post and promptly send out another communication when/if changes are announced.
Although College Board did send students an email offering a refund and a testing voucher, students were told that they would receive official scores from March 8th ONLY if they contacted customer service, ONLY if they did so before seeing their scores, and ONLY if they gave up the opportunity for a retake on March 22nd (for which there was no guarantee of availability). College Board volunteered these remedies ONLY to students it immediately identified as having fallen victim to the 11 a.m. bug.
Advocates for students quickly pointed out the flaws in the remediation plan, and the problems have received press attention. Compass is optimistic that feedback will guide College Board to make some commonsense adjustments to better align with student needs. Even its narrow definition of which students were impacted needs to be rethought.
Score cancellation should not be the default. It is students who should have the final say, and they should only need to make a decision once they are fully informed about their scores. Scheduling a make-up exam should not nullify their rights. Some students were able to disable the bug by going through the reboot process. Although they didn’t fall victim to premature submission, many of them lost actual testing or break time. These students should receive the same consideration.
If you were impacted by the Bluebook bug, what are the next steps?
If you are convinced that you do not need to see your scores, the first priority should be scheduling an appropriate retesting opportunity. The March 22nd make-up exam is not available at all sites, and seats may be limited. The May 3rd SAT will be a good option for some.
If you do not want your scores invalidated, you should contact College Board. We hope that College Board removes its initial restrictions on allowing make-ups in these situations. It should not be an either/or decision.
If you believe that your testing experience was undermined but did not receive an email from College Board about this matter, contact them at http://www.sat.org/inquiry or 866-756-7346.
When will scores be available?
The scheduled release date for the March date is March 21st. College Board has not yet said whether investigation of the timing error will delay scores. Compass and others are calling on College Board to release scores BEFORE students are required to make a decision about cancellation.
Why does Compass advocate for College Board allowing students to see and keep a score for an exam that they didn’t finish?
First, most students did complete the R/W section, and that score can be valuable in the superscoring process.
Second, some students were almost done with the Math section and may be satisfied with that score.
Third, scores are the only feedback students receive on the digital SAT (no questions and answers are provided), so they can provide useful information for future testing.
But won’t a low Math score or low Total score be a blemish on a student’s record?
No. Students can use Score Choice to submit selected test dates to colleges. Georgetown University is currently the only college tracked by Compass that both requires and evaluates all scores. And even Georgetown will have received the memo about the March 8th SAT. The vast majority of colleges superscore the SAT, creating a new Total score from the student’s best R/W performance and best Math performance. Poor scores never bring down a superscore. This should not be a concern for most students.
Can I just retake the Math section?
Unfortunately, no. The SAT is only given as a whole. No option is being provided to simply finish off the remaining portion of the exam or to take only Math.
What can Compass do to help?
Students should keep in practice before their next test sitting. Compass can help by offering all students – whether a Compass client or not – a free practice SAT via our Online Testing Center by entering the code MARCHSAT. The sign-up will be available until March 31st. Compass students can also reach out to their director for advice.
What are the ways College Board must change in order to win back trust?
First, College Board should enact a more humane policy for impacted students. This was College Board’s mistake alone. Students deserve a make-up exam, score results, and an option for cancellation, and they deserve those things without trade-offs. College Board’s computer systems can also track which students avoided the 11 a.m. bug but still encountered problems with their test timing because of remediation attempts.
The Bluebook app is central for SAT, PSAT, and AP testing. College Board must improve its technical controls and test site communication practices. This is not the first — or even the second — time that students have been harmed because of a malfunction. Students deserve an explanation as to why proctors have no emergency override authority in the event of a failure like the one seen in March.
It’s also time for College Board to reevaluate its standard procedure for such incidents so that it can respond more compassionately and appropriately in the future. It should not require public shaming to do the right thing.
There are times when scores must be invalidated in order to protect the integrity of the exam, but invalidation or cancellation should never be the default response, and students should not have to make uninformed decisions. The digital SAT has already pushed the limits of Truth-in-Testing laws by hiding test items from review and obscuring how the SAT is scored. Students should not be further penalized by arbitrary decision-making when mistakes happen.
This post was written in a collaborative effort with Compass Co-Founders Art Sawyer and Bruce Reed, and also drew upon community-sourced information.
