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COLLEGE BOARD FLUNKS SAT TEST. MAY DISCOVER POINT AND CLICK.

It’s hard enough for an overwrought student to take an SAT exam, let alone to get docked 400 or so points because his or her nervously penciled markings get scanned incorrectly. 

Yet, as you’ve no doubt read, that’s exactly what happened to tens of thousands of students who filled out the multiple choice exams, dutifully filling in the blanks to indicate their knowledge of, or best guesses at, the right answers.  The technology The College Board, which oversees the tests, still foists on diligent students reminds us of the infamous Floridian hanging chads.

While college admissions offices may assert they take into consideration an applicant’s complete academic record, scholarships are generally meted out based to a great extent on comparative SAT scores.  As a result, careers have once again been wrecked or seriously altered by the test-maker’s incompetence.  It’s obviously time for the modern world to intrude.

How about, instead of the inconceivably retrograde process of filling in blanks with a pencil, students get to sit at computers on which the test appears and then just point and click their ways through it, saving the answers as they go?

Since there’s still one essay question, we’re sure The College Board can manage to provide a handy space into which the hopeful student can type an answer.

So there’s really no reason that the overseers should not abandon the inherently flawed technology of scanning penciled-in answers and enter the tech ‘n’ peck age, an overdue act of mercy that would allow students to take the exams in a far more reliable way and, by the way, in one that they’re far more familiar with than jousting with pencils.

As a result, the unpredictable career destruction and alteration will finally come to an end, and The College Board will even have some chance of consistently scoring well on its own tests.

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