Test Madness: the Multimillion-dollar Industry of Educational Testing

Students sit nervously but neatly in rows of old school desks. Hopes are high and so is the pressure Whether it is a group of pre-law majors taking the LSAT Test, or a group of expectant high school seniors taking a college entrance exam, the scene is familiar to millions of students every year.

In addition to becoming the latest group of students to perform the traditional rite of passage of test-taking, they are also part of a multimillion-dollar machine called the educational testing industry.

The market for education is enormous, representing roughly $750 billion annually in the United States alone. It is about 10 percent of the US gross domestic product and growing. It doesn’t matter where you are on the education curve – small child, kindergartener, high school student, college grad or even corporate executive – your life will somehow be touched by educational testing.

Thanks to the tests mandated under No Child Left Behind, states will spend up to $6 billion to implement new testing procedures according to the Government Accounting Office. And that only includes the costs associated with creating, scoring and reporting on the tests. It doesn’t include extra costs for the teachers who have been tapped to prepare students for the new tests, proctors who must administer the tests and the time parents and educators spend. The real costs of new testing could be 15 or even 20 times higher than the GAO’s estimates.

It’s a heavy investment, especially when you consider that many teachers and parents are at best undecided about the results of the testing programs. The focus has shifted from traditional learning methods to pure test preparation as schools battle it out for the bragging rights to the highest median test scores in each district and state.

Parents of stressed-out high school students have argued nationwide that colleges and universities need to apply a more personalized process to admissions rather than ranking their students solely on test scores and grade point averages.

But most universities continue to require the examinations for entrance. They have created a market place where students and their parents must bear the additional financial burdens of test preparation in addition to the costs associated traditional education. While the entrance tests themselves are relatively inexpensive – less than $100 for college-related tests, over $100 for graduate related tests – test preparation is another issue entirely. It isn’t unusual for a student preparing for the LSAT test to pay $5,000 in tutoring.

“This seems to create a bias for rich kids,” says M, the founder of Test Sherpa, a web site devoted to bringing free and affordable test preparation tools for the LSAT Test and SAT Test. “If you can afford tutoring, you will score higher. So those with privilege have a special advantage in testing.” To level the playing field, M has put all of Test Sherpa’s LSAT courses into an easily accessible format on it’s web site and is working on converting content for SAT and GRE as well.

“We still charge for tutoring – we incur a cost for that so we have to charge,” M says. “But we want to get as much information about the LSAT out there as possible.” When other companies are charging several thousand dollars for the same information, what Test Sherpa is attempting is quite laudable.

One thing is for sure -- tests are not going away any time soon. Colleges and universities will always face the daunting challenge of assessing student performance and success metrics. And in the meantime, many will continue to profit from the increase in spending on test preparation and administration.