Inside Higher Ed has greatly expanded and updated its article on the situation at ETS. Do check it out again if you haven’t looked since it was posted yesterday.
One thing that grabbed my attention was a note that “ETS will no longer administer the SAT.”
This comes after 77 years of ETS involvement in that test.
A College Board spokesman confirmed that “with the SAT Suite’s full transition to digital on College Board’s Bluebook testing platform, we now develop and administer the SAT and PSAT-related assessments directly.”
This represents the end of an era, I suppose, as running the SAT on behalf of the College Board was the whole reason that ETS came into existence in the first place. The role of ETS in the running of the SAT has steadily diminished since the 2010s, but at one point College Board work represented more than 80% of ETS’s revenue, according to some sources. Indeed, for decades and decades that was the whole raison d’etre of ETS. And as recently as last year College Board work accounted for about 30% of ETS’s revenues.
As Inside Higher Ed points out, ETS will remain involved with the College Board (contributing to the AP program, I guess), but their new contract is much less lucrative than the previous one. We’ll know the exact figure next time an ETS audit is released. That will probably happen in January.