Once again this week I was reminded that College Board is not an educational or research institution, it’s a marketing firm with a product to sell. And like most marketing companies they follow the ABCs as defined by Mitch from Glengarry Glen Ross … “Always Be Closing”
Yesterday, the University of Alabama announced that 2026-27 applicants to all three of their campuses will have to submit test scores. This made me curious about the admissions profile of Alabama, so I logged into College Board’s Big Future to look at the statistics. A few years ago CB redesigned and ruined the Big Future website. This time I was surprised to see that Big Future had changed again. This time it was pretty cool . . . visually.
But I also noticed a few less savory and unsurprising things. Let’s check it out:
AI Cheating: The SAT-ACT Em dash Controversy
The newest “AI” boogeyman is the em dash. Apparently, the large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to use em dashes. This tendency, like the use of particular vocabulary words, is being used to identify AI writing. And of course, in our modern nuance-free age, the use of AI is framed by AI-haters as cheating and by AI-lovers as appropriate use of technology.
But what if I told you that the same high school and college kids being accused of cheating because they use em dashes had been forced to learn that punctuation mark and encouraged to use that punctuation mark by ACT and College Board. Let’s delve into it!
The Lionization of Testing and other weird metrics
Recently, the main villain behind the Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) scandal was released from federal custody after a brief 16 month stint in minimum security detention and has embarked on a reputation rehabilitation tour. With the cooperation of WSJ, ABC, and others, he’s attempting to relaunch a less illegal version of the same business that led to the massive federal investigation that exposed the networking, influence peddling, philanthropy laundering, fraud, and bribery that wealthy people use to get and keep advantages.
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Bellowings 