



Are the SAT and ACT exams truly " equated" beforehand only? Is the scoring curve for each test actually predetermined, as so many seem to think, and the test makers would like us to believe?

"If you want to do equipercentile equating, and you don’t have a good way to smooth the score distributions, there is an alternative. You can perform an equipercentile equating based on the observed distributions, and then smooth the equating relationship. (Some equating experts refer to this approach as “post-smoothing.")"



The answer is a resounding--as long as the exam is a new test form that has never before been "nationally administered"-- even though the College Board falsely and explicitly claims otherwise , and ACT Inc. is purposefully vague on the topic. Confused? Keep reading.That each edition of the SAT or ACT is perfectly equal in difficulty, and that every scoring curve is predetermined with complete accuracy, is certainly what the College Board and ACT Inc. would like us to believe, but historically, there has also been what's called a "smoothing" a.k.a. "curve fitting" process (more popularly known as "curving") after the test is nationally administered for the first time, when a significantly higher amount of student performance information is collected than in the initial equating effort, and the College Board / ACT gains access to a much more sophisticated degree of data about the test. Thus, additional "fine-tuning" adjustments can be made post-test, and these adjustments are indeed made to the final scoring scale before student scores are released.Recent SATs with harsh curves such as the October 24, 2018 PSAT ( -1 710 on Math! ) and the May 4th, 2019 International SAT serve as further evidence that the College Board doesn't know exactly what the scoring curve will be until after the test is given to to a national sample of students, instead of only a small pretest sample group for equating purposes.As you can see from the below PDFs that you can click to download, this type of intentional pre-test and post-test manipulation of SAT scores (whether it is called recentering, redistributing, equating, smoothing, scaling or curving) has been going on for decades, and most likely continues today, when the vast processing power of computers means that there is no longer a limit on the amount of test-day data that can be processed in order to establish a fair scoring curve for each exam. Another term for a "fair scoring curve" is "equipercentile equating."