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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Tax season is over. March Madness season is over. Eclipse season is over. Hopefully, earthquake season is over. For you fans of baseball on the radio, a legendary New York broadcaster's last season is over. John Sterling announced his retirement yesterday in his 36 season of calling the Yankee games. Pollen season, along with baseball has definitely begun, so has deer tick and Lyme disease season.

We'll talk about that in our climate story of the week next hour. Campaign season is ramping up in its long crescendo to November, and as of yesterday, intersecting with Trump criminal trial season, which had its opening day.

We are in high season now for high school seniors who applied to college and got accepted to choose a school. The deadline for accepting your acceptance at lots of places is May 1st or thereabouts, but this year, college selection season has gone weird.

It's weird for some because of the post-October 7th environment at some schools, antisemitism, or anti-Muslim environments have some families uncertain about how welcoming or how safe or how much free speech there is at the places they apply to enthusiastically in the fall.

For many others, what might have been a joyous season of celebrating your acceptance or your child's acceptance or your student's acceptance at the college of their choice has turned into a season of high anxiety because the federal government has messed up the rollout of a new system for applying for financial aid. Many of you know about this. Many of you are living with it. Without knowing how much you're getting, you don't know if you can attend the schools that accepted you, and if you don't know by the acceptance deadline, you could be locked out.

Our lead topic today is college selection season gone weird, especially regarding the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. We have a guest who will explain what's happening and why, and what families in limbo can do about it, and we'll take your calls.

Listeners help us report this story. Who has a FAFSA situation you would like to describe to the world? Maybe we'll have some advice for you, or maybe your story will help others navigate their own FAFSA uncertainty right now. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Help us report this story. Who has a FAFSA situation you would like to describe to the world?

Students, if you're out there today, why aren't you in school, but you can call. Parents, you can call. College admission counselors or anyone else from a high school, you can call. Help us report this story. 212-433-WNYC. Call or text 212-433-9692. If college selection season has gone weird for you or gone uncertain for you for any other reason, the political moment or whatever else, you can tell those stories too. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

With us now, Erica Meltzer, national editor at the education news website, Chalkbeat. Her latest article is called A Bungled FAFSA Rollout Threatens Students College Ambitions. She also reported recently on another rollout, the new more adaptive, as they're calling it, SAT. The much-maligned SAT exam seems to be making something of a comeback. Thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC. Hello, Erica.

Erica Meltzer: Hi. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Just to make sure all the listeners can follow along, whether they're in a high school senior family or not, can you explain the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid- that's what FAFSA stands for, for people who don't know- and what its role is for people in figuring out what colleges they can afford.

Erica Meltzer: Absolutely. The FAFSA is how families share their financial information, both with the government and with the institutions that they've applied to. It determines eligibility for Pell Grants, which are-- These are not loans. This is money that's just a grant to students who come from low-income families. It's really critical for these families to afford college.

It also is how the government determines your eligibility for subsidized loans that have much lower interest rates. Colleges use it to prepare their financial aid packages that might include additional assistance, work-study. A lot of scholarships use it. State financial aid organizations use this information. A lot of times, when we see the cost of college, $70,000, $80,000, very, very few people are actually paying those numbers, and students depend on this financial aid to go to school. FAFSA is how the government and the institutions determine each student's eligibility for different aid packages.

Brian Lehrer: Are there different streams of financial aid, like sometimes the school itself provides the aid, and sometimes it's the federal government through the system you were just describing? What's the place of federal student aid in the overall financial aid picture?

Erica Meltzer: The role of federal aid is going to vary a lot for student to student. Especially for lower-income students, that federal aid, those Pell Grants can be really critical, but there's also state financial aid that also often pulls information from the FAFSA. Work study is something that a lot of students get, and that's also federally backed. Then there's aid from the institutions. There's aid from private scholarship foundations, but for many of these, completing the FAFSA is still necessary even if it's not a federal aid source.

Brian Lehrer: The FAFSA isn't new, but this year the Feds rolled out what was supposed to be a better FAFSA. I think they even called it that, the better FAFSA, What was supposed to be better about it?

Erica Meltzer: The FAFSA is notoriously complicated and stressful to fill out. There was something like 70-some questions and a lot of people felt like none of this is necessary because it relies on information. Most of it's in your tax returns. The federal government already has this information.

The idea was we can really cut it down to many fewer questions. We can pull information directly from families tax returns once they give us permission, and we can make this all much easier and much less stressful. That was the goal.

There's been a lot of reporting on why this new FAFSA has not gone as planned. I think it turned out that the systems that they were trying to meld and make communicate with each other were much more complicated, built in very old programming languages. There was not enough time and money put toward the transition.

They also decided, "Oh, hey, while we're updating these systems, let's do a bigger update." I think there's some debate about whether they actually had to do that. There's been some accusations from Republicans that the student debt relief initiatives of the administration have also been a distraction that prevented them from a successful launch of the FAFSA.

Brian Lehrer: What could go wrong? Lots of stuff, as it turns out. What are some of the biggest problems?

Erica Meltzer: The students who are having the most trouble, these are for the most part, US citizen students who are eligible for financial aid like anyone else, but one or both of their parents doesn't have a social security number related to their immigration status. In the past when people did a paper FAFSA, they could just put in zeros for the social security number and then go on to provide their parents' financial information.

Now with it being digital and has to communicate with the IRS, if you don't have a social security number, you're basically stuck. There's a lot of frustration because this was a very foreseeable problem that was not built into the transition. Students are having to go through extremely complicated income- not income, excuse me- extremely complicated identity verification processes that are taking weeks and weeks and weeks. The form is sometimes simply not working as it's supposed to. That's a large group of students that are affected by the same problem.

Then there's also just a lot of glitches. I myself, I have a high school senior. I have a very common situation where I'm divorced and remarried. Just trying to figure out, just to follow the instructions was very complicated. It wasn't clear at all. Once I actually got in, the form was in fact very simple to fill out, much easier than I remember from when I applied to college, but there was a lot of glitches. It launched, it closed, it launched, it closed. It finished on you without letting you sign it, and so people ended up with these missing signatures and the form was not finished until you finished the signatures, and they still have not permanently opened up corrections that would allow people to fix this. They've been briefly testing them, turning it on and off and on and off.

Supposedly this week, people will be able to make this correction. There's tons of students who are just missing a signature, but until they can sign it, their information has not gone out to the colleges, and the colleges can't prepare their financial aid packages.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text from a listener. Tell me if this is a typical scenario or at least one of the common scenarios. This seems to be written by the student's father, and it says, "My FAFSA was accepted in January, but my daughter was only able to sign her FAFSA a few days ago, and the mother, she's been unable to complete a FAFSA at all. We are separated," the couple, "and daughter is accepted at multiple colleges, but only a few of them extended the acceptance deadline." Sound familiar?

Erica Meltzer: Yes. This is a very common scenario adding both parents when the parents are not married, and together, which is of course a very common family situation for a lot of Americans. That can be very tricky. It was something that I struggled with. Some colleges have extended their deadlines. Others have not, and a lot of students are staring down this May 1 deadline. They don't have their financial aid offers in hand. That's obviously a really critical piece to making that decision, "Where can I actually afford to go?"

Brian Lehrer: Here's a caller who I think is going to report on this from the college's perspective. Here's CT in Morris County in Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hello, CT.

CT: Hi. I am a programmer. I work for a company that does software for small colleges and universities. The stuff that I do is mostly dealing with the financial aid end of things. Yes, we've been dealing with this rollout and the botches and whatnot.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, go ahead.

CT: Go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: You go wherever you were going to go, and then I'll ask you a question after. Go ahead.

CT: Okay. I was just going to say that it's a little bit-- If the schools don't choose to extend their deadlines, I'm not really sure how they would even manage that.

Normally, since the government moved to prior, prior-year tax information, this was a few years back, the schools would normally start getting their ICEERS. Those are the student aid reports that come after the FAFSA. They would normally start getting those in October. This time around, they didn't start getting anything until March. There's literally nothing that these schools could have done. How would they even force the student to accept when they can't possibly package them?

Brian Lehrer: Well, have you had that conversation with people from any of the colleges who you work for-

CT: Oh, yes, sure.

Brian Lehrer: -as programmer?

CT: Yes. None of them are forcing students to make these decisions. They're trying to work with them. When the ICEERS did first start coming out in March, there were a lot of problems with them. As was being said, the people were being left in limbo where they couldn't finish their FAFSA, they couldn't sign, and things like that.

A lot of those things have actually been dealt with things like needing a social security number and all that. Those things can be dealt with. There are other issues that still haven't been dealt with that are rolling along, things like corrections.

Normally what would happen is that when the school goes to start packaging these people, there were well-known formulas for whether or not they could get a Pell Grant, how much other aid they would receive, the need that the student has. All of that was upended with this new formula.

Before on the ICER you would get a flag that would say whether or not the person was Pell eligible. Then you would get their EFC, their effective family contribution, and then the school would say, "Well, here's what the cost of attendance is." Basically with those three things, you could right away say, "This person gets Pell." Then when they start looking at the ICER in more detail, they can see things like what is feeding into the effective family contribution.

From there, they could then, since this is prior, prior-year tax information, obviously things can change between two years ago and now. They could start hitting at the things that feed into that effective family contribution and maybe make professional judgements or whatnot. Then they would start correcting the information or having the student correct it, but they can't do that right now. They just started doing that.

Brian Lehrer: You've given people a lot of really interesting detail about the different streams that feed into the FAFSA applications, and what the colleges see, and where they get it from. Thank you for all of that. Let me ask you one follow-up question, CT.

CT: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: For you as a software person, what's your understanding of how the federal government bungled this new, I guess, software rollout so badly and why it's taking so long to fix all those different pieces?

CT: Honestly, I can't imagine going into this with wishful thinking that we would just make all these changes to all of these interconnected systems and that it would just work. Though at the same time, I work with-- We all work with the boots on the ground, the people, the experts in specific areas. There's a bunch of different systems that are interacting here, and they're trying their hardest.

I think as was said before, they were under-resourced. I think from above them, they were told, "You just have to do this." I hate to say it, but you always hear these analogies like, "Why don't we run government like a business?" or, "Why don't we run government like our households?" Well, government's neither of those things. Whereas it might be okay for a Silicon Valley company to fake it until you make it, it just won't work for something like this FAFSA.

Brian Lehrer: That affects so many people-

CT: Yes, everyone.

Brian Lehrer: -immediately, so directly. CT, great call. Thank you very much for giving us all that detail from the inside as you did. Our guest is Erica Meltzer, national editor at the education News website, Chalkbeat, as we talk about all these problems with the FAFSA this year, delaying college admission for so many people, the-- I guess not admission, but the notification for how much financial aid they're going to get, which of course, affects what acceptances the students can actually accept.

Erica, you can react to anything that CT just described there. One thing that jumped out at me was that he said, "The colleges have to extend these deadlines." If you're supposed to tell a college that, "Yes, I'm accepting your acceptance, I'm going to enroll there by May 1st," that colleges have to be extending that because they don't have all their chips in place from the federal government, so how can they expect the students to make an informed decision about whether they can afford to go there? Does your reporting indicate that all or most colleges are being flexible in this respect right now?

Erica Meltzer: A very large number of colleges are pushing back their deadlines, most to June 1, rather than the traditional May 1. We are still hearing about some colleges that are sticking to May 1. I can only imagine what's going on in their financial aid offices, what kinds of hours people might be putting in to put together packages.

I haven't reported on this as much myself, but my understanding from the reading I've done is that some of the colleges that are sticking to their May 1 deadlines, they might be institutions that have a lot of resources and huge endowments, and they have policies in place where any family who makes below a certain income is automatically a free ride, and then they have very wealthy families that are paying the full price, and so they're willing to let some of those middle-income families go.

There are also smaller colleges that are highly tuition-dependent and their planning is just going to fall apart if they don't know what their class looks like sooner in the season. I also think there's some that are maybe just holding out, some hoping that everything will come together, but I think we're seeing a very large number of institutions push back their deadlines. We're seeing a lot of states also extend the deadline for when you have to complete the FAFSA to be eligible for state financial aid, and it's just all coming to a head.

There was one other piece that the caller mentioned that the social security issue has been fixed. The federal government says that it's been fixed, but when we've spoken with counselors and schools with large immigrant populations, families are still really struggling with this, and so it is an ongoing issue. On a technical level it's fixed, but there's apparently a lot of things that are not working smoothly for those families.

Brian Lehrer: I see you cited one local school, a Brooklyn School as an example of that in your article, the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. You quoted a teacher there named Danielle Intel. What did you hear from Danielle in that school in Brooklyn?

Erica Meltzer: Well, she was saying that students are trying multiple times to get through this ID verification system. At a certain point, they just want to give up. We hear about students who are waiting on hold for two, three hours and then they're hung up on. Often, students are making this call on behalf of their parents who may not speak English very well, or their parents at work. Then when they finally get someone on the line they're told, you can't do this. We need to speak directly to your parent.

I have heard that they are staffing up with more customer service in other languages, but that was an issue for a while. She says, students are telling her, and sometimes they're joking and sometimes they're not, "I don't think I'm going to college." That's really the fear that people have is that students will put in all this work to get this far and then they'll just feel like, "Hey, maybe this isn't actually for me," and then they miss out on opportunities. Also we as a society, will miss out on the things that they could have done.

Brian Lehrer: Why would that happen, to follow up on that, because that's the ultimate evil here if students who are going to go to college now don't wind up actually enrolling at all because of these problems? Does your reporting indicate that that's actually happening? I guess you just said that it appears to be in some cases, as opposed to, let's say, the more mundane harm of being caught in the bureaucracy for some extra time before moving in the same way they were going to.

Erica Meltzer: Yes, right now we don't know the full impact and outcome. There are people who work in this space who are saying, "I think this year is still salvageable if everybody does everything." Right now, FAFSA completions are down 38% compared to this time last year. Students who don't fill out the FAFSA are much less likely to go to college at all. Then for students who come from low-income backgrounds where their parents have not gone to college, they just face barriers at every level.

There are students who are accepted to college who end up not enrolling. There are students who enroll and then drop out because of financial challenges that their family may be encountering. If these students decide, "Hey, I'm going to wait. I'm going to work," that might not seem like a big deal, but statistically, historically once students are out of that high school environment where they're more supported in pursuing academics, they just become much less likely to resume because life gets in the way.

They're making money that their family depends on. They may start a family of their own, and it just becomes that much harder to go back to school. There is a real fear that if we can't solve these problems and students can't make this decision in a timely way, that we're potentially losing them. I think that decline in FAFSA completions that we're seeing is really concerning to a lot of people.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another parent story. Sue in Flushing, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sue.

Sue: Hi. My concern seems so simple compared to these others. We don't rely on the FAFSA, so we were very fortunate for the money coming from the aid. I just finished my daughter's this morning, and my son has to go in and finish his portion of his, and then I think we'll be finished with that. For the last two Sunday mornings, which is a good time for-- my kids have part-time jobs and go to school full-time, I work full-time. The last two Sunday mornings, we tried to log in as a family before everybody had to run off to get this done.

The system was down until 11:00 AM. If they want people to access it, they need to make it available when families are home. It shouldn't be down on a Sunday morning.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Had you heard that Sunday problem before, Erica?

Erica Meltzer: I had not heard that specific Sunday problem, but just in general it's been very unreliable and it has gone down randomly. Whether it's having two people in the same room who need to be in the same room to do it together, or someone who maybe they have spotty internet at home and they need to do it at school and then it's not working when they try and log in, it's been very unreliable and I think it's a really big problem.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a lot of text messages with stories and some questions. Listener writes, "By pushing back the acceptance deadline which seems absolutely necessary, schools will also need to push back their waitlist acceptances. My high school senior is on one of those waitlists. Will she even know before the start of the term?"

Somebody else writes, "Waitlisted kids will have to wait longer than ever to find out if they'll be admitted."

Another listener writes, "I encounter all the problems the guest mentioned. Parent without social security number and missing signatures. I keep calling every day, and the answer varies every day. I call the schools, and they assured me that they extended deadlines and will wait. Although deposits have to be made on time, some will refund if my son doesn't attend." That's a new wrinkle. Have you heard that before that even if the deadline to accept the enrollment offer is moved back, that they still have to get their deposits in by May 1st, not yet knowing if the child's going to be able to go there?

Erica Meltzer: I had not heard that specific one, and that seems like a really big burden to put on families. I have heard about sometimes people need to get on lists for housing and put deposits in for housing. I've heard about students risking their spot on a sports team, which of course is very important to a lot of students if they don't make a commitment.

I think getting this information in a timely way is very important for institutions to plan. Just enrollment in general in colleges is going down as the under-18 population goes down. I think a lot of colleges are thinking about their planning, but when they do this, it really is putting families in a really difficult situation. I wonder if it's really going to be a penny-wise pound-foolish situation if they try and push this when other institutions are being more flexible.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Maria in Clifton, a current PhD student at NYU. Maria, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Maria: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking the call. I'm a PhD in sociology of education at NYU, and I'm also the Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Belonging. One of the things that I think we often neglect in conversations about undergraduate students is specifically student parents. This conversation is framed around traditional-age students that are coming right from high school, but about 40% of all Black women undergraduates actually have dependent children.

Filling out the FAFSA and getting aid is a crucial process, and them deciding if they can go to college or not, and it has greater implications for their economic self-sufficiency and long-term wellness, and all of that, being able to enroll and complete a degree program. I just wanted to add that to the conversation that is not just about our 18, 19-year-olds, but also about a larger group that are suffering from racial and gender inequality.

Brian Lehrer: Such a great point. Are you hearing any stories from anybody in particular?

Maria: Yes. I actually do qualitative interviews and a lot of quantitative data analysis. Some of the conversations that I'm having with women are that they're delaying or deciding not to enroll in programs because they're not certain about the financial aid aspect, and it's already much more difficult for them to attend because they need things like childcare. They have to live off campus. Making this work without knowing about an aid package, it just seems completely out of reach.

I worry that this is going to further exacerbate the racial and gender wealth gap.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for pointing all that out, Maria. Really appreciate it. Erica, anything on that brief?

Erica Meltzer: Those are just fantastic points. I think at every point in this process, the more that a student has going on, the more that they're trying to manage in their own life, the greater impact these FAFSA difficulties could have on their ability to go to college.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to take a break and come back with kind of an addendum with Erica Meltzer from Chalkbeat on something else that she reported on that does apply specifically to anyone hoping to go to college, high school students or later, those who are taking the SAT, which has been falling out of favor. The SAT too is being revised in hopes of making it better and some schools that had dropped it as a mandatory requirement are reinstituting it. We're going to talk about the new allegedly better SAT and what that means right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue for just a few more minutes with Erica Meltzer from the education news website, Chalkbeat, and then Senator Gillibrand is going to join us for her monthly Call Your Senator segment.

We've been talking about the problems with the FAFSA, the Federal Financial Student Aid Form. Erica, before you go, let me touch for a few minutes on your other recent Chalkbeat article about another rollout for college aspiring students that's supposed to be better this year, the new SAT. It's now digital, you report, it's shorter, and it's what they call adaptive. Let's go through those points real quick. What does digital mean in this context?

Erica Meltzer: Instead of a paper test, it is on a computer online. Your computer does not have to be connected the entire time, but it is on a device and it submits your test results electronically.

Brian Lehrer: No bubble forms, no number two pencils you report. What's our culture coming to?

Erica Meltzer: End of an era, I guess,

Brian Lehrer: Shorter. What got eliminated?

Erica Meltzer: They made the reading section instead of lots of long passages, they have more short passages, but just as one or two questions for each passage. On the math section, there used to be a calculator section and a no-calculator section. Now it's all calculator, and it's just overall a shorter test. I think 45 minutes to an hour shorter.

Brian Lehrer: The SAT is now adaptive. I guess this is the biggest change and the most interesting part probably, and I see this means depending on how you do part one or how you do on part one, you get different questions on part two. Is that right?

Erica Meltzer: That's correct. Depending on your performance on the first half of the test, you get either an easier or a harder second half of the test. This is partly how they made it shorter. They feel like they can assess what you can do with fewer questions because of this adaptive quality.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have just a few minutes. If anybody wants to call in real quick about this new SAT if you have experience with it already, or on the question of whether schools are or should be keeping the SAT or restoring the SAT to mandatory status for applicants, 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692.

Adaptive, depending on how you do on part one, you get different questions on part two. Isn't the whole point of the SAT that it's a standardized test, which means by definition that it's the same test so colleges can compare every student apples to apples?

Erica Meltzer: That's correct. I'm not a psychometrician, which is the people who do this for a living.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, there's a term.

Erica Meltzer: Yes. The College Board believes that they can still accurately measure what students can do that a 1100 or a 1300 or a 1500 on the old SAT and the new SAT are basically the same. There are skeptics of the SAT who wonder, has this really been tested enough for them to say that with accuracy. I think people will be looking to see how the average scores and how the distribution of scores for this year's class changes compared to past years.

Brian Lehrer: Have you ever seen the words psychometrician on the vocabulary section of the SAT? [laughter]

Erica Meltzer: Before I worked for Chalkbeat, I did not know that word so there's always more to learn.

Brian Lehrer: If a student does poorly on part one, but does really well on the easier version of part two compared to other easier version students,that can be useful to colleges is what I think I hear you saying.

Erica Meltzer: I think that the colleges are still going to see a total score and a student who gets the easier second half, they would not be able to get a perfect score. What the College Board says is that's just because of their performance. It's not because the test is adaptive. It's because they just didn't get enough questions correct.

Part of what they're hoping to do here is to make it overall a less stressful experience for students. Part of this is related to a lot of states are using the SAT as the standardized test for high school students to determine is the school doing a good job teaching students? That's not actually what the SAT was originally designed for, but a lot of states are using it for school accountability purposes. Because you have every student in that state taking it, including students who may not even be thinking about going to college, they wanted to create a less stressful experience. They also wanted to create a less stressful experience because students don't necessarily have to take it so they want to make it a little more appealing to take the test.

Brian Lehrer: You know what? We're getting a whole bunch of calls from people criticizing or at least critiquing this new digital adaptive SAT. Let's go through a few of these real quick so we don't keep Senator Gillibrand waiting. Andy in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Andy. Your kid took the digital SAT and what?

Andy: He took practice tests before that and he thought he was going to do well and then he didn't do as well when he took it. Then it turned out I read on a blog by by one of the companies that help people with tests that actually, a lot of people did worse on this because they actually made it harder on purpose driving the scores down, particularly of the math section, which really seems unfair to the ones who did it this time that they artificially had their scores lowered by having more difficult questions. I wonder if you know anything about that.

Brian Lehrer: Is that related to it going digital, or do you know anything about that real quick, Erica?

Erica Meltzer: That's really interesting. I can certainly appreciate why that's upsetting and concerning. For critics of the SAT, this is the kind of thing that they've been wondering about. I think the feeling was that we wouldn't really know until this group of students went through this testing experience. That is their concern that this group of students is to some degree a guinea pig for how this new SAT works.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Robert in Brooklyn, a college advisor who has a little sample for us of reaction. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hey, Brian. All of the current crop of juniors I'm working with waited to take it, the digital, and they wanted be one and out in the winter of their junior year. They all disliked it, all of them. They didn't like the adaptive. They just didn't like the test.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Robert: They didn't like the digital version. They felt like it was nothing like the practice tests they had done. Many of them went in feeling they'd do pretty well. I thought they would too. It's been a struggle now. Many of them are going to go take the ATT. They want to be out.

Brian Lehrer: Is that so they have both to compare?

Robert: Yes. Then if they have to take another one in the fall, which they don't want to do and never wanted to do, they'll do that.

Brian Lehrer: Robert, thank you very much. One more. Liz in Brooklyn, do I see that your child is taking the adaptive SAT right now?

Liz: Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Hello, Liz.

Liz: Hi. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Your child is taking the adaptive SAT right now as we speak.

Liz: Yes, that is correct. I have to say that I agree with the previous callers that were talking about how their children did much better on the practice tests than the actual adaptive SAT. The part that I'm curious about is what the speaker was talking about previously, how the test is scored.

If you do well on the first part and on part one, and then you move on to the hardest section, part two, and then those questions are significantly harder, how is that score? How can you be compared-- How can you get the same score then as somebody who got the easier questions? That just doesn't seem fair.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, thank you. We have 30 seconds left in the segment, Erica, for a last response. Obviously, this new digital adaptive SAT has struck a nerve.

Erica Meltzer: Yes. Really interesting comments and experiences from everyone. My understanding is that the person who gets the harder test will probably get a better score, a higher score than the person who gets the easier test. What the college board is contending is that a student who would've gotten a 1500 two years ago would still get a 1500 or an 1100 or whatever. I think as we're hearing from the callers, people are having some different experiences, and I think a lot of people will be watching to see has the College Board actually delivered on that.

Brian Lehrer: Erica Meltzer, National Editor at the education news website, Chalkbeat, thank you so much.

Erica Meltzer: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

 

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