A friend of mine, a college professor, has for the last few years gone to New Jersey to score CS AP exams for the College Board. His comments on this year's experience, found on his blog, really expose the assholery of the College Board.
I wasn't aware that No Child Left Behind provided an incentive for schools to coerce students to waste their time, money, and dignity taking AP exams they aren't prepared for or have any chance of passing, just to boost a meaningless statistic. The only people who benefit from this is the College Board; I'm sure they lobbied Congress quite aggressively to get that as a measured metric.
The only plausible reason for them to use a convention floor for the graders is a kickback from the convention center of some sort. Large-area convention floors are usually more expensive to rent per square foot than smaller spaces, and smaller spaces would serve their purpose better anyway.
Then you have all the general assholish treatment of the scorers. As Don points out, the people doing this generally aren't doing it for financial reasons; their interests are professional or social. I suppose they think that there will always be more graders available next year to replace the ones they lose this year. But I have to wonder how long before they'll be recruiting grad students to do this work.
I wasn't aware that No Child Left Behind provided an incentive for schools to coerce students to waste their time, money, and dignity taking AP exams they aren't prepared for or have any chance of passing, just to boost a meaningless statistic. The only people who benefit from this is the College Board; I'm sure they lobbied Congress quite aggressively to get that as a measured metric.
The only plausible reason for them to use a convention floor for the graders is a kickback from the convention center of some sort. Large-area convention floors are usually more expensive to rent per square foot than smaller spaces, and smaller spaces would serve their purpose better anyway.
Then you have all the general assholish treatment of the scorers. As Don points out, the people doing this generally aren't doing it for financial reasons; their interests are professional or social. I suppose they think that there will always be more graders available next year to replace the ones they lose this year. But I have to wonder how long before they'll be recruiting grad students to do this work.
The rest of the stuff sounds like corporate stupidity, but the convention center thing may actually be worthwhile for the College Board, as they are one of the bigger customers of convention centers, for test administration. They may have gotten that center at a good price because of all the business they generate.
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