This sounds more about cuttings costs than anything else.
I don't see how hard it can be to keep organizing SATs once a year - plus it really does generate a shared identity, which is something we are all sorely lacking. It was a big event to go to a different school to take the SAT.
Pandemic: occurring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population; characterized by very widespread growth or extent
Endemic: characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment; a disease or outbreak of disease that is typically present in a particular region or population : an endemic disease
COVID doesn't even really qualify as endemic based on the dictionary definition, but it's certainly not a pandemic.
How does it not fit the dictionary definition of pandemic?
17,310 admissions, down 10.3% week over week
2.1% of deaths, down 8.7% WOW
1.5% of ED visits, down 14.6% WOW
7.4% of tests are positive, down 0.9% WOW
None of those numbers indicate growth. None of those numbers indicate a significant proportion of the population. I'll give you geography, but that's also characteristic of an endemic illness - distributed across a large geographic region among a small percentage of the population with relatively little impact.
If your argument is that these numbers are not enough for "very widespread extent", then are you saying it was never a pandemic to begin with?
And you already said it was endemic. Are you arguing that a pandemic needs bigger numbers than that?
98.5% of ED visits are for something else. What would that number have been in 2020 or 2021?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
The severity has dropped more than the prevalence.
Hospitalizations suggest that in the US the peak in Jan 2024 was around 80% as big as Jan 2023. If that's accurate, then Jan 2024 had more cases per day than most of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. That's a lot of extent. There had been 120 thousand cases in the entire world when pandemic was originally declared, and the US is currently doing a multiple of that each week.
People who want to cheat will always find a way to cheat. All you need to do now is go to the bathroom and lookup answers on your phone.
How does this contradict the GP? This doesn't necessarily seem inconsistent with standardized tests correlating better with academic success on its face. Because I would expect that such people tend to have not just worse standardized test scores but also worse academic success (because of the advantages that wealthy people have that these people lack).
If someone with a high aptitude but low academic performance is put into a situation where they have more access to resources, they will perform better than someone with low aptitude that has the means to make up for it in their academic success.
For instance, the popular college prep hack is take the SAT three times. Study for a different section each time, and colleges will take your highest score of each section. That’s not possible without the moderate financial means to take the test multiple times.
Your average high school student does not have thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of dollars at their disposal to cheat on the SATs.
You're not going to be able to take this with an iPad on your couch (or with a friend/parent nearby). Likely just as draconian as today, except no pencils required.
When I was in HS, we had IB tests that were much longer, and were seen as grueling tests of endurance. And after law school, I took the CA bar exam, which was at the time the only 3-day bar exam. It was (in)famous for endurance.
But do people think the SAT is measuring endurance? I don't, but perhaps others do.
One thing that won't change is any effect on pacing. The SAT previously had sections, and it will continue to have sections. You still have to pace yourself through each section. But there was never a way to pace yourself across sections, through the entire test. You had to wait until one section was done before starting the next.
[1] https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/help-center/students/p...
"you are not allowed to bring any electronics into the testing center (except a computer that you own, possibly running a VM)!" isn't likely to deter cheaters.