PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

Learning Objectives

• Define utilitarian ethics.
• Show how utilitarianism works in business.
• Distinguish forms of utilitarianism.
• Consider advantages and drawbacks of utilitarianism.

The College Board and Karen Dillard

"Have you seen," the blog post reads, "their parking lot on a Saturday?""CB-Karen Dillard Case Settled-No Cancelled Scores," College Confidential, accessed May 15, 2011. It's packed. The lot belongs to Karen Dillard College Prep (KDCP), a test-preparation company in Dallas. Like the Princeton Review, they offer high schoolers courses designed to boost performance on the SAT. Very little real learning goes on in these classrooms; they're more about techniques and tricks for maximizing scores. Test takers should know, for example, whether a test penalizes incorrect answers. If it doesn't, you should take a few minutes at each section's end to go through and just fill in a random bubble for all the questions you couldn't reach so you'll get some cheap points. If there is a penalty, though, then you should use your time to patiently work forward as far as you can go. Knowing the right strategy here can significantly boost your score. It's a waste of brain space, though, for anything else in your life.

Some participants in KDCP – who paid as much as $2,300 for the lessons – definitely got some score boosting for their money. It was unfair boosting, however; at least that's the charge of the College Board, the company that produces and administers the SAT.

Here's what happened. A KDCP employee's brother was a high school principal, and he was there when the SATs were administered. At the end of those tests, everyone knows what test takers are instructed to do: stack the bubble sheets in one pile and the test booklets in the other and leave. The administrators then wrap everything up and send both the answer sheets and the booklets back to the College Board for scoring. The principal, though, was pulling a few test booklets out of the stack and sending them over to his brother's company, KDCP. As it turns out, some of these pilfered tests were "live" – that is, sections of them were going to be used again in future tests. Now, you can see how getting a look at those booklets would be helpful for someone taking those future tests.

Other stolen booklets had been "retired," meaning the specific questions inside were on their final application the day the principal grabbed them. So at least in these cases, students taking the test-prep course couldn't count on seeing the very same questions come exam day. Even so, the College Board didn't like this theft much better because they sell those retired tests to prep companies for good money.

When the College Board discovered the light-fingered principal and the KDCP advantage, they launched a lawsuit for infringement of copyright. Probably figuring they had nothing to lose, KDCP sued back.

College Board also threatened – and this is what produced headlines in the local newspaper – to cancel the scores of the students who they determined had received an unfair advantage from the KDCP course. As Denton Record-Chronicle reported (and as you can imagine), the students and their families freaked out. Staci Hupp, "SAT Scores for Students Who Used Test Prep Firm May Be Thrown Out, "Denton Record Chronicle, February 22, 2008, accessed May 15, 2011. The scores and full application packages had already been delivered to colleges across the country, and score cancellation would have amounted to application cancellation. And since many of the students applied only to schools requiring the SAT, the threat amounted to at least temporary college cancellation. "I hope the College Board thinks this through," said David Miller, a Plano attorney whose son was apparently on the blacklist. "If they have a problem with Karen Dillard, that's one thing. But I hope they don't punish kids who wanted to work hard".

Predictably, the episode crescendoed with everyone lawyered up and suits threatened in all directions. In the end, the scores weren't canceled. KDCP accepted a settlement calling for them to pay $600,000 directly to the College Board and provide $400,000 in free classes for high schoolers who'd otherwise be unable to afford the service. As for the principal who'd been lifting the test booklets, he got to keep his job, which pays about $87,000 a year. The CEO of College Board, by the way, gets around $830,000". "AETR Report Card," Americans for Educational Testing Reform, accessed May 15, 2011, http://www.aetr.org/college-board.php. KDCP is a private company, so we don't know how much Karen Dillard or her employees make. We do know they could absorb a million-dollar lawsuit without going into bankruptcy. Finally, the Plano school district in Texas – a well-to-do suburb north of Dallas – continues to produce some of the nation's highest SAT score averages.

 This text was adapted by Saylor Academy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work's original creator or licensor.