College Board Keeps Apologizing For Screwing Up Digital SAT and AP Tests

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate Anderson: Don't worry about the 'mission-driven not-for-profit' College Board -- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.

Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required 'Bluebook' testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only 'solution' was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to 'an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time.' Stressing that 'most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far,' College Board nonetheless did 'regret that their testing period was disrupted.' It's not the first such disruption, though.

College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test -- and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on 'an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook.' The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more 'may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error.' College Board did 'deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families.' It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher.

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