On Saturday, March 8, 2025 at 11:02 am, three students taking the SAT at Spring Woods High School in Houston, Texas encountered an error that abruptly ended their exams with a large portion of time remaining and roughly half of the math section left. On their screens, the students received a message congratulating them and notifying them that their scores were submitted. With no clue as to what had just happened, the students and the proctor present in the room attempted to troubleshoot the issue. They tried everything from logging out and back into shutting down their computers. Unfortunately, the issue was not solved.
The students who ran into this issue were told that there was nothing that could be done. They later discovered that College Board experienced an issue that caused this mishap. As they left the room one student checked their email to discover that College Board sent out an email at 7:56 am that morning informing them of the issue and instructing them to log out of and restart the BlueBook application before beginning the exam. Unfortunately, the students were already inside their designated testing rooms, setting up their exams, with no access to their emails. Then at approximately 11:18 am, a student received a text message from College Board re-stating the issue. Once again though, the message was too late since at that point the students had begun the test and already encountered the issue.
The students were instructed to call College Board on the following Monday as there was nothing that could be done at the moment. The students inquired about why they had to wait until Monday to call and they were told that College Boards only accepted calls on weekdays. The College Board website also states this. The three students who ran into this issue, having spent the last two hours in the exam room, were all frustrated.
One Junior, who attends St. Johns High School, named Claire Adkins decided to take the initiative and call one of the numbers listed under the SAT student and parent inquiry form. After being on hold for 20 minutes she was redirected to a call center where an employee answered. According to the employee, there are a limited number of options available for the students who encountered this problem. She stated that students could either wait for an email from College Board with options of what to do next or create a case. The employee mentioned that College Board may offer options such as re-taking the exam, continuing the exam at a later date, or canceling the exam altogether. In addition to this, the employee mentioned that the decision on whether or not there would be a re-test would be up to both the school and College Board. One thing that was not mentioned, is that it is possible that there would be no re-take offered but instead, the student would be refunded for the test as there is a fee required to take the SAT. They did, however, mention that the issue was nationwide and affected a large number of test takers. However, this issue appears to be global.
Students all over the world took to social media to see if any others experienced this issue. Reddit, a popular media and forum-style social platform, had a large number of users who shared their March 8 SAT experience. One Reddit user under the name clin06 created a thread to which multiple different students responded mentioning how they experienced the same issue. According to them, as well as multiple news sources from Vietnam, this issue has impacted many students and may negatively impact their applications. This unfortunate mishap has left many students wondering what the next steps are. As far as they know there may be nothing they can do to salvage the work they had done. This also raises questions about how College Board plans to manage this international error and whether they will allow students to continue with their exams. Among many questions that have thus far gone unanswered, one that prevails is whether or not students will be provided an option to retake the test at all.
This issue has left affected students with large amounts of frustration, energy, and time wasted. Due to this students are anxiously waiting for more information about their next steps. This global error has caused multiple students, parents, and proctors large amounts of stress. As of March 12th, College Board has yet to announce how they will address this.
