Bay Area students compete for SAT sites
The SAT — the college admissions test feared by generations of high school students and criticized by some educational experts as discriminatory — is at an inflection point.
This month, the test moved entirely online, though students still must take it at designated testing sites. Meanwhile, some elite colleges that shunned the test during the pandemic are moving to require it again. In the Bay Area and across California, a shortage of testing sites is stressing out families and forcing them to travel — sometimes to other states — and to wait in long lines.
The changes and challenges come as college admissions continue to be a high-stakes, highly competitive and nerve-wracking rite of passage for the state’s high school students and as families struggle to afford college educations.
For many of the high school juniors preparing to apply to colleges, the competition begins early — with a battle to sign up to take the SAT. While the University of California and California State University systems won’t even consider the test results and other schools have made them optional, some private and out-of-state schools still require them. And many prospective students believe the test scores can help their admissions chances, even where they’re not required to submit their scores.
Some Bay Area students recently had to travel an hour or more to take the test, often to Sacramento or Fresno, according to parents, college consultants and test tutors. A few were forced to go even farther.
“I get plenty of stories here of people having to travel to Barstow or Nevada or Oregon to take the test,” said Erin Billy, who runs TestMagic, a San Francisco SAT tutoring center. “If you don’t jump on registration as soon as it opens up, all the (nearby) seats fill up.”
Sarah Feldman, an independent college admissions consultant who lives in Alameda, said some of her clients’ families are even planning spring breaks or vacations around locations where SATs are available. Feldman’s daughter, a junior, is opting not to take the SAT because of the stress.
“I just don’t understand why they make it so difficult,” said Caroline Gould of Albany, the mother of twin juniors. “Why do they have to make people travel an hour or more away? It just doesn’t make sense.”
The College Board, the nonprofit that runs the SAT, acknowledges the difficulty of signing up for the test in the Bay Area. Fewer than half of the schools that served as testing centers before the pandemic have returned, it said. To deal with the shortage, the board has set up some “pop-up” testing centers like one March 9 at the South San Francisco Conference Center near San Francisco International Airport.
“We are looking for opportunities to open more pop-up test centers,” the board said, “but that is not our preferred solution. Schools and testing centers provide a more familiar test-taking experience for students.”
The lack of SAT testing sites in California is not just an inconvenience — it raises equity concerns, experts said. Not all families can afford to fly their student to another state to take the test or embark on an SAT vacation.
Some students may not be able to get a ride or even catch a bus to a site dozens of miles or more from their home and school.
“It is unbelievably inequitable,” said David Blobaum, who runs a test tutoring business in New Jersey and is on the board of the National Test Prep Association. He said the lack of tests particularly shortchanges underrepresented students who may not have superior grade point averages but perform well on tests.
The College Board said its School Day program can expand access. The program allows schools or districts to pay the organization to set up the inschool tests during a regular school day, eliminating the need to fight for a spot at a traditional public session on a Saturday and allowing students to take the tests in a more familiar environment. School Day tests are typically offered to juniors in the spring and seniors in the fall. Discounts are given to schools or districts with a lot of low-income students taking the tests.
A variety of schools take advantage of the program, from elite private schools to large urban districts. But in the Bay Area, neither San Francisco Unified School District nor Oakland Unified School District offer SAT School Days tests, though at least two large districts — San Ramon Valley Unified and Fremont Unified — do, according to their websites. While the College Board did not provide a list of schools offering the SAT School Day, it said that “nearly 100 public schools” in the Bay Area participate and that all schools are eligible.
According to the College Board, slightly more than half of the SATs taken in California in 2023 were taken during school days at the students’ own schools. Not everyone considers it equitable, especially those who don’t have access to the School Day program.
Gould’s daughters attend different schools — one is at Albany High School, the other at a private high school. Her public school student had to jockey to find a distant test site in the spring. The other “had it handed to her on a silver platter,” Gould said. She took the test last week in her own school.
“It’s definitely not fair,” she said.
Jonathan Fong, a chemistry teacher at San Francisco’s Lowell High School who helps the district coordinate testing, said the district doesn’t participate in the School Day program because it requires each school to pay administrative costs and to reconfigure schedules and staffing. That reduces instructional time and makes it difficult to find suitable rooms for testing.
“Offering the SAT during the school day at various high schools in SFUSD would require many changes to our students’ school day,” he said. “SFUSD currently operationalizes one of the largest testing centers in the San Francisco Bay Area for all seven of the SAT Saturday test dates. This allows us to provide students with multiple dates to access the test in San Francisco without impacting students’ school days.”
Because of the shortage of seats for Saturday SAT tests, Lowell, which serves as a weekend testing center, has added 350 seats for each spring testing date, bringing the number of available seats to 900, he said, and making it one of the Bay Area’s largest testing centers.
The shortage of testing slots has been somewhat of an issue for years but became acute during the pandemic when high schools shut down in most states, and the admissions tests with them. Test scores became optional for 2021 admissions at virtually every university as a result, and some extended the test-optional admission process for years or even indefinitely.
Citing concerns over long-acknowledged socioeconomic and racial inequities in the SAT, the University of California decided to stop considering SAT scores at all and the California State University system and others followed suit, declaring their processes “test blind.”
In the past few weeks, however, some of the nation’s more prestigious universities have started reversing course. Dartmouth College, Brown University, Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin have announced that they’ll again start requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.
With the SAT’s future up in the air, particularly in California, some experts questioned whether the College Board’s commitment to the state and its prospective college students has waned.
“The College Board is not putting as many resources into California because of that uncertainty” over which schools will require or consider the SAT, said Aaron Andrikopoulos, co-owner of AJ Tutoring, which has coached Bay Area students on SATs since 2003.
The College Board insists neither is true.
“We’ve heard from California students and their interest in taking the SAT remains strong,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “Students want the option to submit test scores to colleges and some travel long distances to test because there are not enough seats available in their community. We know that this is frustrating for students and families.”
The board said it’s working to try to persuade test centers that closed during the pandemic to reopen, as well as asking current test centers to increase the number of seats. Those efforts have added 3,000 seats at seven new locations in California in the past year, the board said.
And 6,000 more will be added in the Bay Area on the next two SAT test weekends in May and June, dates that were full this week, the statement said. Details on when and where those seats will be added were not specified.
Still, if California students are shut out from taking the test, it could cost them billions of dollars in scholarships, according to Blobaum of the National Test Prep Association.
“So many out of state schools in particular have automatic scholarships for students who meet certain score thresholds,” he said. “Without the opportunity to test, California residents are automatically excluded from these and other scholarships.”
Parents need to demand that their schools offer SAT testing to make up for the shortage, he said, adding that New Jersey schools in his area did so when pressured by parents.
In the meantime, Billy of TestMagic suggests that people who haven’t been able to sign up for the SAT at a suitable location keep going online and keep looking for openings, which pop up as cancellations come in — and often vanish just as quickly.
“You could sit there all day and refresh,” he said. “And you might have some luck.”