The challenges with last year鈥檚 launch have been well-documented. In fact, I took a six-month leave from my post as president of the College Board to join the U.S. Department of Education in fixing the FAFSA. After months of hard work, we are confident this year will be much better. We arrived at this point by adhering to a few best practices for technology development, whether for the government or the private sector.

The development and launch of a new FAFSA for the 2024-25 admissions cycle faced unique challenges. In today鈥檚 world, policy complexity produces software complexity. In turn, software complexity produces increased expenses, delays, and errors.聽

In December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act 鈥� well-intended, bipartisan legislation that aimed to shorten the form, increase accuracy by importing tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, and, ultimately, expand eligibility for Pell Grants.

This Act required brand-new software composed of multiple components that are themselves integrated to a dozen other systems, many housed in other agencies. While the Department of Education is full of devoted public servants with tremendous knowledge about financial aid and a passion for helping people go to college, they had limited experience building modern, complex software applications. In addition, due to the nature of government contracting, the Department ended up working with four separate vendors to build the new FAFSA. 

Given all of these challenges, the problems encountered during the 2024-25 launch should not have been a surprise. But that is little comfort to students and families who had a difficult experience last year.

So why is this year better? In preparing for the 2025-26 launch, our work was guided by five key principles, all of which can be applied to any government endeavor:

1. Focus on what is most important. A common mistake in software is trying to do too much. Failing to make tough choices leads to missed deadlines, poor code quality and user frustration. We focused on two things: 1) fixing any bugs that prevented students from submitting the form; and 2) delivering a stable application on a defined timeline for students, families, and institutions of higher education. This required us to make tough choices, such as deferring some new features, which allowed us to launch well ahead of last year鈥檚 schedule.
2. Use data to identify critical user issues. Data is a powerful tool to zero in on challenges that affect large numbers of users. For example, a question in the 2024-25 FAFSA about a 鈥渄irect unsubsidized loan鈥� was originally worded in a way that unintentionally caused too many students 鈥� over 5% 鈥� to forgo Pell Grants and subsidized federal loans. After seeing the data and working with users, that question was redesigned, and the number of students misinterpreting it declined precipitously.
3. Invest heavily in testing. Comprehensive testing is the most important aspect of any complex software project. We developed multiple new testing tools and methodologies, marrying data science and automated testing, that enabled us to verify the accuracy of the data we send to colleges, universities, and state agencies. We collaborated with the IRS to double-check the tax data that we receive. Most importantly, we conducted seven weeks of beta testing with more than 70 organizations 鈥� college access nonprofits, high schools and school districts, colleges and universities 鈥� before expanding testing to all interested students earlier this week. Over 67,000 students submitted real FAFSA forms during this testing period, and we traveled to many universities to sit with financial aid professionals as they independently verified the data we sent them.
4. Embrace transparency. Because of the uncertainties and delays surrounding the 2024-25 FAFSA, key external stakeholders felt unprepared to support students. A chorus of advisors from the wider community told us that we needed to be more open about the work underway this year, both strides and setbacks, in order to build back this trust. We invested time and effort in building more channels and frequency for communication, including a new website at where we regularly updated statistics, provided updates on bug fixes, and shared stories from the field.
5. Harness the power of the broader community. The success of the FAFSA depends not just on the government but also on a large ecosystem of organizations that play a vital role in supporting students and families. In part because of the breakdown of trust, the community was often out of sync and at times at-odds. By intentionally engaging these stakeholders, we were able to strengthen the partnerships needed to deliver a successful launch for families, including a critical testing period.

Ahead of the launch in November, we knew that the large majority of students can complete the FAFSA quickly: Over 90 percent of this year鈥檚 applicants reported that they completed it in a 鈥渞easonable amount of time.鈥� Ultimately, for many people, the promise of FAFSA simplification 鈥� a simpler form that provides more aid 鈥� has been or will be realized.

There is more work to be done in the years ahead. There will be families who may struggle with the FAFSA; there are usability issues we have not had time to fix yet. For example, the ability for a student to invite their parent to the form needs to be simplified. The team is aware of these problems and will now turn its attention to making further improvements that will benefit everyone, especially those from underrepresented communities.

Building good software is hard; building good software under the unique constraints of the federal government is harder. But delivering a simpler FAFSA that serves students, families and institutions is a strong first step 鈥� and continuing to apply these lessons will build on that success.

After his administration prohibited the adoption of a newly developed AP course on African American studies, the Republican governor last week, openly musing about dropping all AP classes throughout the state. Even with many Florida students and families protesting the decision, governors in four other states that they would also review the content of the new course, warning that it could introduce political content into classrooms. 

Daryl Scott, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and self-described “anti-public intellectual,” sees enough blame to go around. While lacerating the College Board for acquiescing to DeSantis’s criticism and revising its product, he sees the rising GOP star as an opportunist exploiting white anxieties to build his political brand. 

Scott spent much of his career at Howard University before departing to chair Morgan State’s history department last year. He previously served as the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1915 by the pioneering Black thinker and academic Carter G. Woodson. Along the way, he has become a kind of historian of Black studies, acquiring an insider’s view of the field’s leading figures and intellectual tendencies: multiculturalists and Afrocentrics, social scientists and humanists.

His commentary on national affairs and Black historiography bleeds over from to a lively social media presence. In neither venue is Scott known for pulling punches, sometimes excoriating writers and educators for yoking their scholarship to political causes. Over the last few years, one of his most frequent targets has been the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which as “an exercise in African American exceptionalism that elides the question of class.” 

In a conversation with 蜜桃影视’s Kevin Mahnken, Scott turned his focus to the political clash in Florida, where he said conservative backlash is endangering the study of Black history. But he added that historians and teachers alike should be leery of wading into cultural wars that they aren鈥檛 equipped to win 鈥� and potentially alienating families in the bargain.

鈥淲e need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K鈥�12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms.鈥�

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

蜜桃影视: Let’s talk about the content of this AP course. The is that the curriculum, and particularly the sections that focus on more recent history, privileges radical voices and leftist critiques of American society. Do you think there’s substance to that complaint?

Daryl Scott: I’m pretty much a gadfly when it comes to that final curriculum. It’s not so much that I take issue with it. I just want to point out to the people who participated in it that it could have been a much different curriculum.

First and foremost, it’s a college course that’s taught in high schools. This is where some folks on the Right get lost, but again: This is a college course, taught in high schools, potentially for college credit. And it becomes the basis for admission into the better colleges in this country. 

I happen to have been part of the redesign of AP U.S. History, which recognized a whole lot of things that the Right now calls problematic. So maybe we should just stop for a second to see what they’re calling problematic. Half of critical race theory has to do with optimism versus pessimism about the present and future of race in America. The pessimism started in the 1950s, with saying that things weren’t going fast enough: “These obstacles are here! We thought we were going to dismantle the structure of white supremacy and usher in equality, and it didn’t happen. Will it ever happen? Maybe not.”

When did pessimism become something you can legislate against? We’re legislating against pessimism now, and legislating for American exceptionalism? And as I’ve said elsewhere about the 1619 Project, when did racial progress become a pet idea of conservatives? I’m old enough to remember 鈥� and we should still have to teach 鈥� that it was conservatives who believed Black people couldn’t assimilate; now they’re saying they’re optimistic that Black people should assimilate, and you can’t teach otherwise.

The big point is that academic freedom in a college-level course dictates that we can debate all these things. This is why they’re fundamentally wrong, no matter what’s in the College Board’s curriculum. And this is why the College Board itself was fundamentally wrong when it allowed itself, whether through external pressure or otherwise, to be put in what I used to call “self-check.” If they weren’t being expressly censored by the state of Florida, they self-censored. And they did this for the same reason textbook publishers do it all the time: so they could get their products through state departments of education. That has a negative impact on what is being taught. 

We’re saying that we’re going to create a college course for high school students, and we’re going to limit inquiry? Can we get more backwards and un-American than that? My belief system has always been one of racial pessimism, and here’s what I mean: I’ve been of the belief that the best we could do as a society was to hold racism in check. And we could reach a set of fairly equal opportunities, and likely equal outcomes, if we could hold racism in abeyance. That marks me as a pessimist; in Black studies, there are lots of people who call themselves , and there are critics of Afropessimism, like Cornel West, who now has to defend pessimism [against censorship]. I don’t want to speak for him, but West that the problem with racial pessimism was that it didn’t believe in the Christian notion of human progress and redemption. 

Some people say, “Well, you can’t teach about Black Lives Matter,” but at this point, something that happened between 2013 and 2020 is pretty much a historical topic. If you can’t even teach about the facts of that movement, you’re doing something that used to be done in the Soviet Union 鈥� erasing history, saying, “That is not a valid topic of inquiry.” Black studies includes debates around reparations, and anyone who knows I don’t think reparations are going anywhere. But in a democracy, reparations can be debated.

One of the problems with the whole course is that it attempts to be a history course. But Black studies, and many studies, tend to be fairly contemporary. The content of most of these courses, if you were to ask me, should be 21st-century topics. We should be trying to figure out the consequences of assault weapons through these courses, the consequences of a society in which quality healthcare is not widespread. In other words, the need for a studies program at the college level is to be robust in debating the issues before society. What we’re being told in Black studies now is that we can’t debate things because it’s indoctrination, and yet, the people claiming this say that we should be teaching American exceptionalism. That’s an indoctrination program.

The concern of everyone in a democracy should be how we debate matters, not what we debate. Some people on the Right have reached the foregone conclusion that we’re not going to have a debate and that teachers will, of necessity, indoctrinate. They’re pretending that we’ve got madrassas out here. But nobody’s sending their kids to madrassas, and anybody who understands the teaching profession knows that they try their best not to indoctrinate. So no matter what critique I have of the content of the College Board course 鈥� and I do have a critique 鈥� the bigger issue in a democracy is academic freedom and holding teachers responsible for teaching responsibly. If they’re indoctrinating, it should be dealt with in schools, not at the state level.

You mention a few times that the AP African American Studies course is effectively a college seminar. But it’s still being taught to high schoolers, and academic freedom is strictly limited, if not nonexistent, in K鈥�12 settings. If 16- and 17-year-olds are being taught a curriculum that Florida voters don’t agree with, doesn’t the governor have the authority to intervene?

I hear what you’re saying. But let’s put brackets around the College Board, because we know that the origins of Florida’s law [the Stop WOKE Act, passed in 2022] don’t lie with the College Board. The origins lie in the broader assault that comes in the wake of, and as a consequence of, the New York Times’s 1619 Project. 

Some genius of political persuasion put three words together that are very volatile: critical race theory. It never gets taught like that in K鈥�12 settings, but I’m a good enough intellectual historian to know that nothing stays within its box. So elements of it have been taught in K鈥�12, and the power of this critique is right in the name. By labeling everything “critical race theory,” it brings out three things conservatives don’t like to hear: They don’t like “critical,” they don’t like “race,” and they don’t like “theory.” Critical race theory has become the perfect foil to go after everything you don’t like in a history culture war. So it’s brilliant on their part.

The problem is that they’re effectively telling parents 鈥� Black parents, white parents, any parents 鈥� that their children cannot be taught Black history if it’s not a good-time story. To survive under this repressive regime, Black history has to shoot for [a tone] somewhere between the old-school, “We all happy negroes here,鈥� and this other idea, “Ain’t we done great lately?” That’s the content they’re allowing to be taught, and anything else is said to be something that makes whites feel guilty.聽

Now, I do hear what you’re saying, and I keep telling people to stop acting like we’re talking exclusively about college courses. We should pause and ask the question, “Are white kids being made to feel bad about America? Are white kids being made to feel bad about being white? Are they being made to feel individually guilty for slavery or any other form of racial oppression?” To the extent that is the case, white parents have a point, and they have cause for concern 鈥� in the same way that Black parents, historically, had cause for concern that their children were being taught that slaves were happy and didn’t really want their civil rights, or were being told that they were racially inferior. 

Everybody in a multicultural, multiracial democracy has a vested interest in their kids not being taught to have negative feelings about themselves. That should never be the goal of K鈥�12 education. I’m not going to be flippant, like some of my colleagues can be, and say that white kids should just toughen up. No, we’re talking about kids! Everybody’s got ’em, and I don’t want to accept that an eight-year-old boy, or even a 15-year-old girl, should have to “toughen up.” The teacher is supposed to take care that generalizations are not visited upon individuals in a way that makes them responsible for what someone else has done. Children cannot bear the weight of all of society’s ills. We believe that self-image should not be damaged through the educational process. So to the extent that white parents have this concern, we all need to address it.

But that does not make it legitimate to go wholesale into violating what should be free inquiry. You should not reduce the curriculum to something resembling a right-wing madrassa. That is the problem with DeSantis: Rather than just saying that educators have the burden of delivering curriculum that leaves intact the self-image of all students 鈥� and most teachers do this 鈥� he is creating a fairytale effect for white folks at the expense of all students learning. And race is only one side of the [Stop WOKE] law. The real focus of that law is LGBTQ rights, because there’s a live debate about when these discussions enter education. We need to have that debate in a sane and civil way as well, but not by outlawing things at the state level and exploiting the politics to get elected.

It’s notable that this clash between Florida and the College Board just seems to keep growing. Gov. DeSantis that he’s open to the state just dropping the whole range of AP courses. 

It’s been suggested that the College Board should have told Florida, “Take ’em all or take none!” I’m not a political prognosticator, but it’s also been said that DeSantis stakes out hard positions that he later reverses when no one is looking. For example, he went after Disney, but then later of all the measures he was supporting. So this seems like a feint of some sort, because there would be hell to pay in Florida [if AP courses weren’t offered]. There are so many kids in Florida who need the AP courses to get to the best schools in the country. 

You don’t just get college credit from the AP exams. Some schools use AP scores as a proxy to determine who’s qualified to attend. And politically, it’s not like Florida is Mississippi. People would be up in arms, whether it’s the well-heeled people or the striving people, about the prospect of their kids not having access to AP classes. 

So the College Board might get the better of DeSantis on this, but to me, the College Board should have stood on principle rather than self-censoring. Or they should have had the guts to take a look at this stuff earlier on. In other words, they brought people together, and they were trying to legitimize a class that was going in a direction they were willing to go. If they felt it was going too far, they should have had the guts to stop it before that point. Sometimes, you can feel the College Board giving you the sense of how far they’re willing to go. Having sat on a board, I know that the board is sometimes going to protect the institution. If they were disposed to doing that, the College Board should have been protecting the institution before they ultimately did. 

But once they went down this road, I really believe their decision to cave in to censorship was wrong, because it was a massive cave-in. I’ve kept telling people, “Don’t believe any of the spin they’re putting out.” You could see their spin about this, and the next thing you know, Florida between them and the College Board. There was no smoking gun, but they had a clear sense all along. When the law passed, they didn’t need anybody to tell them. Between the first version of the curriculum and the second, there was that Stop WOKE law, and they must have known which way the wind was blowing.

Is it necessary that there be a widely available course for high schoolers on African American studies? And, if so, should the College Board be the ones to develop it?

Everybody is free to do what they want. I believe in an open market of education.

By the same token, another track for all of this could have been pursued by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It could have been pursued as well by the National Council of Black Studies. But especially when we’re talking about red states and the CRT debate, one of the issues has been finding consensus about the content for any of these courses. Whoever first took the initiative would have to fight for some kind of market share; schools would probably only adopt your particular version if, and only if, they felt it would be widely adopted. So it was likely that the College Board would be the most successful at this.

But if you know how the College Board functions, you’d know that their process was going to preserve the hierarchy of the academy. They were going to the most elite echelons of the academy and select participants from a cross-section of the discipline. It’s a multicultural strain of African American studies that I tie to the rise of [Harvard professor] Henry Louis Gates; , as a department, as opposed to various programs that had a menagerie of people from different disciplines. 

Something else has happened since then, which I call “Black Studies 4.0,” and which goes beyond what Gates and his generation of scholars signed onto. It’s a development out of the same camp, but it’s a more forthrightly race-conscious group. So it’s not surprising to me that elements of the AP course are different from what most of Gates’s generation would have created. Even though the College Board selected people like [Harvard historian] and Gates himself to be figureheads of sorts, the content looks more like that of a younger generation. They’re in the same multicultural tradition, but this new generation is more race-conscious, more committed to tangible goals like reparations and LGBTQ rights and things like that. 

This was always going to be an issue. For instance, in the College Board’s original curriculum guide, which was leaked, Afrocentric thinkers were just a marginal part of that. You’re not old enough to remember the ’90s, right?

Not really.

Well, this is where it gets interesting. People say that there’s been one continuous war against Black studies. But they’re kind of glossing over the 1990s and pretending that the political configuration is the same as it was then. 

Here was the situation in the ’90s: Afrocentric scholars were placing an emphasis on changing the K鈥�12 curriculum in many places across the country. They had great influence in the Black community and had some success in changing the curriculum to fit their goals. They got close to having great success in New York in changing the statewide curriculum and, in doing so, between political liberals about and about Afrocentrism. It was a fight about education, but it didn’t involve true conservatives; we’re talking about a fight between Afrocentrics 鈥� who often said that only Black people could study Black people 鈥� and mainstream academics, most often education policy people like Diane Ravitch. The way it played out, on the academic level, was as a debate over the claims of progressive and Afrocentric scholars that the Western tradition came “out of Africa.” I’m probably misrepresenting that clash somewhat because it was never my central concern in life. [Laughs.]

Can you provide a little flavor of how this debate came to be?

When Black studies came to higher education in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was led by Black Power-ites, who tended to be social scientists and very political. They wanted policy changes, but they never succeeded in winning the mainstream of the academy. In fact, their affiliation with Black Power turned out to mean that Black studies only functioned well at the second and third tiers of the academy. In the elite schools, Black studies was pretty much a set of programs where people really stayed in their original disciplines. No one even conceptualized any notion of Black studies as having any kind of uniform mission. The Black Power-ites at the second- and third-tier institutions did. 

They got slaughtered at the elite colleges, and most of the leading Black scholars wanted nothing to do with a departmental status for Black studies. The big-time Black scholars at elite schools were big-time within their own disciplines, not Black studies. I say all of this because Skip Gates finally moved from that programmatic style of Black studies at Yale to the creation of a proper Black studies department at Harvard, and how he got there was important: He got there by critiquing Afrocentrics. And he made the mainstream academy safe for a new brand of Black studies.

The point I’m making is that this fight in Florida isn’t just a new front in the same war. If you want to say this is the same war, you’re fooling yourself about who was fighting it all this time. 

The conservatives weren’t in that fight! You can point to people like Allan Bloom and , or to [Arthur] Schlesinger’s book, . But remember that Schlesinger was an old-line liberal. Where we are now is a completely different place. Nobody back then was passing laws to invalidate the teaching of certain kinds of Black history. It’s a full-on assault on academic freedom, and it’s quite a different thing from last time.

It sounds as though you’re saying that the debate over how to teach African American history essentially has essentially broken through, from the academy to society at large, with predictable political effects. On the one hand, that’s potentially destructive, but on the other, it’s a marker of the success of the discipline, right?

It’s the success of a certain strand of Black studies, exactly. But there’s a related point: Before anybody ever talks about Black studies, and before it pops up as a field in the 1960s, there had been a Black history movement . Over the years between 1915 and the 1970s and ’80s, what had effectively happened is that the study of Black history made it into the school systems. People like me never felt that it was enough, and I know the criticisms that said, “We only talk about the same five people every February,” but that was an exaggeration. It wasn’t a true assessment of the progress that was made in bringing the study of Black history into the curriculum.

started during the 1960s. They included Black history. You saw textbooks changing to include Black subject matter and Black imagery. Hell, I’ve even seen books out of Bob Jones University Press that had multicultural images in them. In the ’60s, we were fighting a war for rights; but with that war came a notion that, now that Black people were in schools, they were going to be taught something about themselves. That’s how the rights war led to the culture war.

In the United States Army, I had officers who could stand up during Black History Month and lead pretty good Black history conversations. They knew the cast of characters. There was some kind of presence of it anywhere you went in society, even if you were talking about fairly conservative schools. In fact, I could take you to former segregation academies where they’re teaching Black history. The ones that survived did so because they were pretty upscale, and they ended up being integrated and hiring Black folks who would teach Black topics in courses. So let’s not pretend there was no progress being made, and let’s not pretend that conservatives were trying to purge it. Because they weren’t.

Given the existence of these laws about instruction on race and sexuality, what is the responsibility of organizations like the College Board when it comes to creating these curricula? I realize that they disappointed a lot of people by revising this course, but the legal reality in a large number of states meant that they were always likely to cave, right?

The College Board was always going to cave here, because they cannot afford to lose states like Florida and Texas. Even if they wanted to give up the “heartland,” they can’t lose those states. 

Gates was attempting to create a multicultural democracy, and so he was more attuned to people’s feelings. This younger generation of scholars believe that you’ve got to power your way through. There is this sense that the ultimate victory is theirs, and sometimes, they don’t deal with the political realities of what won’t fly in the heartland, or off of college campuses generally. Quietly, there are people in the Black community who don’t want to hear that, and they’re not too interested in that kind of compromise. 

I would have been much more open to debate within the confines of the College Board. But I become a hardcore advocate of academic freedom, particularly with a college course, once it’s been developed. And particularly when it’s supposed to represent the best knowledge we have, however we got to this position. 聽

But I take the meaning of your question to be: If the College Board was going to cave, should they have been the vehicle for this project in the first place? I would flip it and ask, would anyone have adopted a Black history course from the Association of African American Life and History? Would it have been the gold standard at elite institutions?.

It’s like I said: Everybody is free to do what they want. Me trying to say what the College Board should or shouldn’t do would be akin to saying that McGraw-Hill shouldn’t have a Black history textbook. That violates the liberal principle, which I share with someone like Henry Louis Gates, that inquiry and the presentation of knowledge should be universal. In a democracy, you don’t have a monopoly on studying yourself and your own group; everybody gets a chance to put forward their version. So I support the College Board and its right to create this course. But as big a giant as it is, the fact that it caved is a bad thing for all of us. 

Even with the disappointment you feel over the College Board’s reversal, I’m wondering how you feel about the development of a widely available course on African American studies. You may have designed it differently, but how do you feel about the end result?

Well, that is the shame of it all. There is no legitimacy to any course in African American studies that cannot grapple with the historic reality of the Black Lives Matter movement. Think about what it would be like if you said, “9/11 didn’t happen! Don’t talk about 9/11!” We can feel however we want about Black Lives Matter, but we can’t pretend that that movement 鈥� which has lasted for almost a decade 鈥� didn’t happen. Would you like for someone to say, “The ’60s didn’t happen”? 

It’s beyond ahistorical. It’s erasing history and saying it didn’t happen. DeSantis wants us to say, so to speak, that Black Lives Matter did not happen. But Black Lives Matter has shaped much of the second and third decades of the 21st century. How do you pretend it didn’t happen, for good, bad, or ugly? Is the next thing to say that the LGBTQ rights movement didn’t happen? You can’t talk about it, so we can’t even study the historical phenomenon now? 

The College Board will tell you, “You can do it, it’s an optional module.” But we know that optional modules aren’t tested and are rarely taught. Could you imagine a course on Western civilization where you can’t teach the French Revolution? [Laughs.]

What do you think of complaints that DeSantis’s win here was only partial 鈥� that the course still contains elements of left-wing orthodoxy that need to be expunged?

Here’s what I keep telling my friends when it comes to any of these related issues: We cannot write off the carnage that is already taking place, among both teachers and students, in places that aren’t just red states. There are where teachers are being told they can’t teach Black history in predominantly Black schools, because they’re supposedly teaching it wrong. There was where CRT was used as a pretext to get rid of a principal.

So there is real carnage out here. The big losers are teachers and students. Now, the Left likes to say 鈥� and this is a lot of my colleagues 鈥� “Hey, we’re selling more books than ever!” Yeah, and that represents a fraction of the children who aren’t learning anything about topics that they were learning the day before yesterday. The impact of the anti-CRT, anti-critical analysis movement is profound. The National Review can pretend that every school district in any liberal state is teaching critical race theory, but you can get fired anywhere in Oklahoma because someone spies on your classes. So it becomes a way of going after people and purging Black history from schools in ways we’ve never really seen before. 

This hearkens back, as some have said, to the Jim Crow era, when Woodson’s disciples used to teach with his book under their desk at the risk of being fired. We won that war. It was a rights war that had cultural consequences. We win rights wars, conservatives win culture wars. But we’ve been fighting this thing as a culture war, and we’ve been so dumb and blind to not care about white kids as students. That’s the biggest mistake we’ve made.

When [Gov. Glenn] Youngkin won in Virginia, this issue of what kids were being taught was a big part of it. The notion that white kids were being made to feel bad was what flipped some people from Democrat to Republican. We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K鈥�12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up. If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms. It’s unethical for teachers to go after kids, and teachers typically don’t do it.

I saw a documentary last fall about how the Civil War is taught around the country. A teacher in a Boston school had a conservative kid in class. Even though he’s a conservative, I can identify a little with him: They went after him, and he held his ground. But the job of the teacher was to make sure that he had a chance to express his decidedly conservative point of view. The job of the teacher is to prevent the conversation from devolving into ad hominem attacks.聽

And when we go to even younger levels, teachers have an even greater burden. You don’t let kids gang up on anybody in those settings. That’s teaching, and that’s how we should discuss it 鈥� but to outlaw things is political demagoguery. And that’s where we find ourselves now, because we served up this culture war.

If you had a high school-aged child, would you let him or her take this AP class?

I would talk to my kid and let them make the decision. 

My whole idea of parenting is to empower my kid to know how to make decisions, and then live with the consequences of what they decided. My kids are both grown now, but I don’t walk into a room and say, “Intellectually, you can’t do this for such-and-such a reason.” People have to be free, and this is part of it when we’re talking about high school-aged kids.

On the other hand, if I really thought my kids were being taught to hate themselves, or that they were guilty of something 鈥� oh hell, I’m getting into the school. Like I’ve said, we need to pay more attention to these parents. I think they’re being sold a bill of goods, but we shouldn’t just dismiss this with a sweep of the hand. “Toughen up?” You’re talking about kids who might be six or eight or 12 years old.

Hundreds of Floridians, civil rights activists and religious leaders from across the state marched Wednesday from Tallahassee鈥檚 Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to the Florida Capitol building complex in protest of efforts to 鈥渨hitewash鈥� Black history by rejecting an Advanced Placement course in high school on African American studies.

The large crowd also included students and older folks and many Black activists and advocates 鈥� including civil rights leader Al Sharpton 鈥� who rallied against the DeSantis administration over what students can learn in school regarding Black history and other topics.

At the historic church, Ben Frazier, with the advocacy group Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, said that the DeSantis administration is attacking the rights to tell the truth about slavery, racism and white supremacy.

鈥淔olks, the policies and the practices of this racist DeSantis regime, are in fact a vile and poisonous form of indoctrination. Simple and sweet: it鈥檚 political propaganda. I call it 鈥榟ogwash,’鈥� Frazier told the crowd gathered inside the church. The pews were nearly filled.

鈥淏y his efforts to whitewash American history, this governor is trying to turn back the sands of time,鈥� Frazier added. He led the crowd in a chant: 鈥淎llow teachers to teach the truth.鈥�

The crowd later left the church to start the march to the Florida Capitol building. There were signs and chants along the road, which led up to the Florida Senate side of the complex outside.

Metaphorically addressing Gov. DeSantis, Bishop Rudolph W. McKissack Jr., a senior pastor of the Bethel Church in Jacksonville, said that:

鈥淲e are not saying you don鈥檛 want Black history, but what we鈥檙e saying is we won鈥檛 let you have it your way. We will not let you tell our story from your perspective.

鈥淲e will not let you redact our history so that your children are comfortable. The reality is your children, and other generations can be comfortable now, because our ancestors were uncomfortable,鈥� McKissack continued.

The rally gathered largely in response to an ongoing battle between the DeSantis administration and the century-old nonprofit College Board, which created a new AP African American studies course for high schoolers who can earn college credit.

The Florida Department of Education rejected the then-pilot course, according to a letter sent to the College Board in mid-January, causing a nationwide outcry and concerns that the move diminishes the importance of Black history and Black culture.

But the scope of the march and rally Wednesday spanned far beyond the AP African American studies course. The comments from faith leaders and Florida lawmakers touched on policies impacting the LGBTQ+ community, women, and immigrants.

The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the potential of Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president. Sharpton called DeSantis 鈥渂aby Trump.鈥�

鈥淏lack, Latino, women, LGBTQ 鈥� we beat Big Trump. We鈥檒l beat Baby Trump,鈥� he said.

鈥淎fter Disney one day, after Blacks the next day 鈥� he鈥檚 like a baby,鈥� Sharpton said. 鈥淕ive him a pacifier and let some grown folks run the state of Florida.鈥�

After his dig at DeSantis, Sharpton brought it back to teaching Black history to young Floridians.

鈥淵ou ought to tell the whole story鈥� Our children need to know the whole story. Not to know how bad you were, but how strong they are. We come from a people who fought from the back of a bus to the front of the White House. Tell the whole story,鈥� Sharpton said.

He warned: 鈥淚f we can鈥檛 protect education in Florida, it will jump to Alabama, it will jump to Texas 鈥� this is a national crime.鈥�

Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat who represents part of Miami-Dade County, said Wednesday, also spoke to teaching history centered around minority communities.

鈥淏lack history is American history. Queer history is American History. Black immigrant history is American history,鈥� Jones said.

He added: 鈥淲hat we are dealing with here in this moment 鈥� the structure of a system that continues to perpetuate racism across this country, not just in the state of Florida,鈥� Jones said at the Capitol. 鈥淭he fight is never just about AP history. The fight is against this strong uprising of racism from people who are seeing the shifting of America.鈥�

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

As Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to chastise the century-old College Board and its related programs 鈥� from honors-level Advanced Placement courses to college entrance exams 鈥� eliminating those activities could create a dramatically different school experience for Florida high schoolers.

In just 2022, nearly 200,000 students in Florida took the college entrance exam called the SAT, and tens of thousands of high school students have participated in Advanced Placement courses that could lead to earning college credits ahead of schedule.

If those programs are eliminated in Florida public high schools, it鈥檚 not clear how families would react if DeSantis makes changes. The debacle arose last month over an AP African American studies course that has become a national controversy.

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DeSantis reiterated his skepticism of the College Board at a press conference Tuesday while responding to聽 media questions. He said that high school students should still be able to earn college credits, but the Florida Legislature may look into other vendors.

鈥淎re there other people that provide services? Turns out there are. IB courses, they鈥檙e actually more rigorous than AP, and the colleges accept it. You have the Cambridge, which is also more rigorous,鈥� DeSantis claimed at the press conference in Jacksonville. He did not provide any data or metric for comparisons.

DeSantis is referring to International Baccalaureate (also known as the IB program) and the Cambridge聽 Assessment. He did not provide information about those other two programs.

In addition, Florida also offers what鈥檚 called dual-enrollment courses, which allow high school students to take a college-level course at their own schools or at a community college.

It鈥檚 not clear how well any of these programs would serve as a replacement for AP courses.

DeSantis continued: 鈥淪o, Florida students are going to have that ability (to earn college credit). That is not going to be diminished. In fact, we鈥檙e going to continue to expand it. But it鈥檚 not clear to me that this particular operator is the one that鈥檚 going to need to be used in the future.

鈥淪o college credit: yes. Having that available to everyone: absolutely. Does it have to be done by the College Board? Or, can we utilize some of these other providers 鈥� who I think have a really, really strong track record. So I don鈥檛 think anyone should be concerned about, somehow, our high schoolers not having opportunities for that. They absolutely will. I just think it鈥檚 a matter of what鈥檚 the best way to do it,鈥� DeSantis said.

Currently, not every student takes AP classes in public high schools. And not every school provides an IB or Cambridge program.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued a statement Tuesday after DeSantis threatened Florida students and families with the elimination of all Advanced Placement classes:

鈥淎P classes have become an avenue for American students to get a head start to college. They provide enrichment and rigor and engage the curiosity and ambition of the young scholars who choose to enroll. Threatening to ban all AP courses because the governor is in a political spat with the College Board is the behavior of a bully, not a statesman. Gov. DeSantis has chosen to put his political ambitions over the aspirations of Florida鈥檚 students鈥攊ronically, in the same state that, to date, has incentivized educators to teach AP.

鈥淭he alternatives floated by DeSantis鈥攖he International Baccalaureate and Cambridge Assessment鈥� don鈥檛 provide the same breadth of course offerings and are not widely accepted by other colleges and universities. As a former AP government teacher, I would hope he would stop these threats and uphold his duty to help children, not ransom their hopes and dreams for a better life.鈥�

The rift between the DeSantis administration and the College Board started over a new AP African American studies course. The Florida Department of Education rejected the course, according to a letter sent to the College Board in mid-January, causing a nationwide outcry and concerns that the move diminishes the importance of Black history and Black culture.

鈥淎s presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,鈥� the Jan. 12 letter said.

The College Board has since pushed back against the department鈥檚 comments on the African American studies course, calling it 鈥渟lander鈥� in a

Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Shevrin Jones Wednesday morning and a press conference about the governor鈥檚 comments regarding AP African American studies. Jones represents part of Miami-Dade County.

He was joined by civil rights activist Al Sharpton, a handful of religious leaders, students and parents to discuss the DeSantis鈥檚 administration rejection of the AP course.

Here is some data for readers, which was not included during DeSantis鈥檚 press conference.

As to Advanced Placement courses:

According to a College Board report from April 2022 on data from the year prior, there were 2,548,228 students who took at least one AP exam in 2021 across the United States. Because many students take multiple AP courses at a time, the College Board reports that there were 4.5 million AP exams taken in 2021 in a variety of course options.

In terms of the SAT college entrance exam:

In 2022, there were 190,427 Florida students who took the SAT, according to data from the College Board.

The data refers to what the College Board calls 鈥渞eadiness benchmarks鈥� which means a 鈥渟ection score associated with a 75% chance of earning at least a C in first-semester, credit-bearing, college-level courses鈥� in either math or English and writing courses.

In Florida, only 31 percent of students who took the SAT in 2022 met the benchmark score for the math portion of the exam and 59 percent met the benchmark for the Reading and Writing portion.

But compare that to the 1.7 million students who took the SAT nationally in 2022. Of the 1.7 million, 45 percent of students met the math benchmark score, and 65 percent met the benchmark score for the Reading and Writing portion.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

Since that disclosure in New York City schools, the scope of the breach has only grown, with districts in six states announcing that some had become victims. Illuminate has never disclosed the full extent of the blunder, even as critics decry significant harm to kids and security experts question why the company is being handed awards instead of getting slapped with sanctions. 

Amid demands that Illuminate be held accountable for the breach 鈥� and for allegations that it misrepresented its security safeguards 鈥� the company could soon face unprecedented discipline for violating , a self-regulatory effort by Big Tech to police shady business practices. In response to inquiries by 蜜桃影视, the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank and co-creator of the pledge, disclosed Tuesday that Illuminate could soon get the boot.

Forum CEO Jules Polonetsky said his group will decide within a month whether to revoke Illuminate鈥檚 status as a pledge signatory and refer the matter to state and federal regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, for possible sanctions. 

鈥淲e have been reviewing the deeply concerning circumstances of the breach and apparent violations of Illuminate Education鈥檚 pledge commitments,鈥� Polonetsky said in a statement to 蜜桃影视. 

Illuminate did not respond to interview requests. 

In a twist, the pledge was co-created by the Software and Information Industry Association, the trade group that last month as being  among 鈥渢he best of the best鈥� in education technology. The pledge, created nearly a decade ago, is designed to ensure that education technology vendors are ethical stewards of kids鈥� most sensitive data. Its staunchest critics have assailed the pledge as being toothless 鈥� if not an outright effort to thwart meaningful government regulation. Now, they are questioning whether its response to the massive Illuminate breach will be any different. 

鈥淚 have never seen anybody get anything more than a slap on the wrist from the actual people controlling the pledge,鈥� said Bill FItzgerald, an independent privacy researcher. Taking action against Illuminate, he said, 鈥渨ould break the pledge鈥檚 pretty perfect record for not actually enforcing any kind of sanctions against bad actors.鈥�

Through the voluntary pledge, launched in 2014, hundreds of education technology companies have agreed to a slate of safety measures to protect students鈥� online privacy. Pledge signatories, , they will not sell student data to third parties or use the information for targeted advertising. Companies that sign the commitment also agree to 鈥渕aintain a comprehensive security program鈥� to protect students鈥� personal information from data breaches. 

The privacy forum, which is , has long maintained that the and offers assurances to school districts as they shop for new technology. In the absence of a federal consumer privacy law, the forum argues the pledge grants 鈥渁n important and unique means for privacy enforcement,鈥� giving the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general an outlet to hold education technology companies accountable via consumer protection rules that prohibit unfair and deceptive business practices. 

For years, critics of providing educators and parents false assurances that a given product is safe, than a pinky promise. Meanwhile, schools and technology companies have become increasingly entangled 鈥� particularly during the pandemic. As districts across the globe rushed to create digital classrooms, few governments checked to make sure the tech products officials endorsed were safe for children, by the Human Rights Watch. Shoddy student data practices by leading tech vendors, the group found, were rampant. Of the 164 tools analyzed, 89 percent 鈥渆ngaged in data practices that put children鈥檚 rights at risk,鈥� with a majority giving student records to advertisers.

As companies suck up a mind-boggling amount of student information, a lack of meaningful enforcement has let tech companies off the hook for violating students鈥� privacy rights, said Hye Jung Han, a Human Rights Watch researcher focused on children. As a result, she said, students whose schools require them to use certain digital tools are being forced to 鈥済ive up their privacy in order to learn.鈥� Paired with large-scale data breaches, like the one at illuminate, she said students鈥� sensitive records could be misused for years. 

鈥淐hildren, as we know, are more susceptible to manipulation based on what they see online,鈥� she said. 鈥淪o suddenly the information that鈥檚 collected about them in the classroom is being used to determine the kinds of content and the kinds of advertising that they see elsewhere on the internet. It can absolutely start influencing their worldviews.鈥�

But the regulatory environment under the Biden administration may be entering a new, more aggressive era. The Federal Trade Commission announced in May that it would scale up enforcement on education technology companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that 鈥渋llegally surveil children when they go online to learn.鈥� Even absent a data breach like the one at Illuminate, the commission wrote in a policy statement, education technology providers violate the if they lack reasonable systems 鈥渢o maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of children鈥檚 personal information.鈥� 

The FTC  declined to comment for this article. Jeff Joseph, president of the Software and Information Industry Association, said its recent awards were based on narrow criteria and judges 鈥渨ould not be expected to be aware of the breach unless the company disclosed it during the demos.鈥� News of the breach was . 

The trade group 鈥渢akes the privacy and security of student data seriously,鈥� Joseph said in a statement, adding that the Future of Privacy Forum 鈥渕aintains the day-to-day management of the pledge.鈥� 

鈥楢bsolutely concerning鈥�

Concerns of a data breach at California-based Illuminate in January when several of the privately held company鈥檚 popular digital tools, including programs used in New York City to track students鈥� grades and attendance, went dark. 

Yet it that city leaders announced that the personal data of some 820,000 current and former students 鈥� including their eligibility for special education services and for free or reduced-price lunches 鈥� had been compromised in a data breach. In disclosing the breach, city education officials of misrepresenting its security safeguards. The Department of Education, which over the last three years, to stop using the company鈥檚 tools. 

A month later, officials at the New York State Education Department launched an investigation into whether the company鈥檚 data security practices ran afoul of state law, department officials said. Under the law, education vendors are required to maintain 鈥渞easonable鈥� data security safeguards and must notify schools about data breaches 鈥渋n the most expedient way possible and without unreasonable delay.鈥� 

Outside New York City, state officials said the breach affected about 174,000 additional students across the state.

Doug Levin, the national director of The K12 Security Information eXchange, said the state should issue 鈥渁 significant fine鈥� to Illuminate for misrepresenting its security protocols to educators. Sanctions, he said, would 鈥渟end a strong and very important signal that not only must you ensure that you have reasonable security in place, but if you say you do and you don’t, you will be penalized.鈥� 

Meanwhile, Illuminate has since become the subject of two federal class-action lawsuits in New York and California, including one that alleges that students鈥� sensitive information 鈥渋s now an open book in the hands of unknown crooks鈥� and is likely being sold on the dark web 鈥渇or nefarious and mischievous ends.鈥� 

Plaintiff attorney Gary Graifman said that litigation is crucial for consumers because state attorneys general are often too busy to hold companies accountable. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 got to be some avenue of interdiction that occurs so that companies adhere to policies that guarantee people their private information will be secured,鈥� he said. 鈥淥bviously if there is strong federal legislation that occurs in the future, maybe that would be helpful, but right now that is not the case.鈥�

School districts in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oklahoma and Washington have since disclosed to current and former students that their personal information had been compromised in the breach. But the full extent remains unknown because 鈥淚lluminate has been the opposite of forthcoming about what has occurred,鈥� Levin said. 

companies to disclose data breaches to the public. Some 5,000 schools serving 17 million students use Illuminate tools, according to the company, which was founded in 2009.

鈥淲e now know that millions of students have been affected by this incident, from coast to coast in some of the largest school districts in the nation,鈥� including in New York City and Los Angeles, Levin said. 鈥淭hat is absolutely concerning, and I think it shines a light on the role of school vendors,鈥� who are a significant source of education data breaches. 

Nobody, , can guarantee that their cybersecurity infrastructure will hold up against motivated hackers, Levin said, but Illuminate鈥檚 failure to disclose the extent of the breach raises a major red flag. 

鈥淭he longer that Illuminate does not come clean with what鈥檚 happened, the worse it looks,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t suggests that this was maybe leaning on the side of negligence versus them being an unfortunate victim.鈥�

鈥楢 public relations tool鈥�

When six years ago, it acknowledged the importance of protecting students鈥� data and said it offered a 鈥渟ecure online environment with data privacy securely in place.鈥� , Illuminate touts an 鈥渦nwavering commitment to student data privacy,鈥� and offers a link to the pledge. 

鈥淏y signing this pledge,鈥� the company wrote in a 2016 blog post, 鈥渨e are making a commitment to continue doing what we have already been doing from the beginning 鈥� promoting that student data be safeguarded and used for encouraging student and educator success.鈥� 

Some pledge critics have accused tech companies of using it as a marketing tool. In 2018, argued that pledge noncompliance was rampant and accused it of being 鈥渁 mirage鈥� that offered comfort to consumers 鈥渨hile providing little actual benefit.鈥� 

鈥淭he pledge may be more valuable as a public relations tool than as a means of actually effecting 鈥� or reflecting 鈥� industry improvements,鈥� according to the report. Gaps between the pledge鈥檚 public declarations and companies business practices, it concluded, 鈥渋s likely to mislead consumers.鈥� 

In 2015, a software researcher found a large share of pledge signatories infrastructure to guard student data from hackers. Three years later, The New York Times published , a nonprofit that administers the widely used SAT college admissions exam. College Board, the report exposed, was selling student data to third parties in violation of the privacy pledge. In response, the College Board鈥檚 status as a pledge signatory had been placed 鈥渦nder review,鈥� but as an active signatory a year later. The College Board, it said in a press release, had committed to changing its business practices. 

Still, in 2020 found the College Board was sending student data to major digital advertising platforms, including those operated by Microsoft and Google. The College Board, . 

The nonprofit is 鈥渞esolute in protecting student data privacy,鈥� a spokesperson said in a statement. 鈥淥rganizations that receive data from College Board, such as high schools, districts, colleges, universities, and scholarship organizations, must adhere to strict guidelines when using that data.鈥�

Some critics have argued the College Board should have been removed from the pledge, but the Future of Privacy Forum has held that taking such action against signatories could do more harm than good. When the forum becomes aware of a complaint against a pledge signatory, it typically works with the company to resolve issues and ensure compliance, . The think tank argued it鈥檚 best to work with noncompliant companies to improve their business practices rather than exile them from the pledge outright. Removing companies 鈥渃ould result in fewer privacy protections for users, as a former signatory would not be bound by the Pledge鈥檚 promises for future activities.鈥� 

Attorney Amelia Vance, a former privacy forum employee and the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting, said the pledge has nudged education technology companies to change their business practices to ensure they鈥檙e following its provisions. 

鈥淚 almost always thought of it as a way to make companies better and more aware of student privacy than something to be enforced with specific teeth,鈥� said Vance, who declined to comment on whether Illuminate should be removed. 鈥淎fter all, the Federal Trade Commission and state [attorneys general] are the ones who really have the enforcement powers here.鈥�

But self-policing efforts, like the pledge, are 鈥渙nly as effective as the enforcement,鈥� said Levin, the school security expert. Otherwise, it can only serve as 鈥渁 nice window dressing鈥� for Big Tech efforts to fend off stricter state and federal regulations 鈥� provisions he said must be strengthened. 

At a minimum, he said the privacy forum should disclose companies that have been credibly accused of violating the pledge and to conduct investigations. If they find a company out of compliance, he said 鈥渋t鈥檚 not clear to me that they should be allowed to re-sign the pledge.鈥�

鈥淚f I were another signatory of the pledge, I would be quite concerned about whether or not the value of that pledge is being diminished鈥� by including companies that violate its provisions, he said. 鈥淚f it鈥檚 going to serve its purpose, there needs to be some policing.鈥�

But to Fitzgerald, the privacy researcher, the forum鈥檚 failure to take action against bad actors has long rendered the pledge useless. 

鈥淚t鈥檚 not like the pledge finally doing what the pledge should have been doing five years ago would make a difference,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 never too late to start鈥� removing companies that violate its provisions, he said, but 鈥渢he fact that it hasn鈥檛 happened yet seems to indicate that it鈥檚 not going to happen.鈥� 

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to the Future of Privacy Forum and 蜜桃影视

The digital version of the test will be rolled out internationally in March 2023, while students in the United States will have to wait until March 2024. A pilot of the online test was conducted last fall, with both test takers and administrators largely voicing their approval.

The new testing format will be accompanied by a number of substantive changes. The test will now take roughly two hours to administer, down from approximately three hours for the pencil-and-paper version; students will also receive more time to answer each question. Reading passages will be shortened, with just one question attached to each passage, and calculators will be allowed for all math sections of the test (currently, the math portion includes some 鈥渘o calculator鈥� sections). 

But according to the College Board鈥檚 announcement, some elements of the new SAT will resemble the old: Scores will still be measured on a 1,600-point scale, and the test will be accessed by students at schools or testing centers, rather than at home. 

Most of all, the College Board emphasized, the virtual test would assess the same material, at the same level of rigor, as the SAT does today. The organization鈥檚 vice president of college readiness assessments, Priscilla Rodriguez, said in an interview that the benefits of the change lay in 鈥渟treamlining and simplifying everything around the assessment of reading, writing, and math.鈥�

The digital SAT is 鈥渕easuring the same skills and knowledge that today’s SAT does, it’s just doing it in a slightly different way,鈥� Rodriguez said. 鈥淪tudents still need to know the core reading, writing and math skills that research shows, again and again, are necessary for career and college readiness.鈥�

The process of simplification could yield some logistical benefits to everyone involved in taking or giving the SAT, according to the College Board. Online test administration will reduce the burden of sorting and shipping test materials and allow students to receive their scores in a matter of days rather than weeks. Schools will also have greater latitude in deciding where and when to administer the exam, which could allow more students to take it.

The new version of the exam received high marks from both students and test proctors in a survey conducted by the College Board, with 100 percent of proctors reporting that their experience administering the digital SAT was either the same or better than its paper-and-pencil equivalent. Eighty percent of student respondents said that the changes made the process of taking the test 鈥渓ess stressful.鈥�

Christal Wang, a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, was part of a randomly selected group of about 500 students in eight countries who took part in the virtual pilot in November. While she did not receive her score from the pilot, Wang said that she found the online test easier than the paper-and-pencil version 鈥� which she took in August 鈥� because of the changes to the reading portions.

鈥淭hey removed the long passages that were traditionally in those sections and replaced them with short paragraphs for each question,鈥� she wrote in an email. 鈥淚 personally liked the digital format more primarily for this reason, because it took less time for each question and it helped me maintain focus.鈥�

But the unveiling of the new format may also raise the question of whether the digital exam is not only easier to take, but also also easier to pass 鈥� especially given the pace at which colleges have adopted test-optional admissions requirements during the pandemic.

According to from the Urban Institute, the number of four-year universities featuring test-optional policies has increased from 288 to 927 since the emergence of COVID-19. Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell Universities 鈥� among the most prestigious in the world 鈥� testing requirements through at least 2024, and several legislatures to make their entire state university systems test optional over the past year.  

At the same time, of the high school class of 2021 sat for the SAT 鈥� down 700,000 from the total for the class of 2020.

Rodriguez said that she hoped the alterations to the exam would make it 鈥渕ore approachable鈥� to students, but added that the move online was also the realization of a plan that COVID had accelerated, not originated.

鈥淲e’ve been listening for years to students and educators on what it’s like to take or give our test. There are a lot of limitations to being a highly secure, paper-and-pencil test that circles the globe, and we’re able to break a lot of those limitations by going digital.鈥�