It's not the College Board's problem to solve. Their goal with the SAT is to offer colleges a predictor of college success. Why should they try to incorporate a form of affirmative action into their test? Why not leave that up to the admissions offices that will have a more complete picture of the applicant's background?
Making test prep materials more accessible doesn't really sound like affirmative action to me. It's not an attempt to counterbalance this particular socioeconomic bias, but rather to remove it.
The socioeconomic correlation isn't a bias - it reflects the reality that a poor childhood leaves you less prepared to do well in college. Erasing that effect without fully erasing the causes of the effect is a cover-up that defeats the purpose of the SAT.
Making the test harder to hack by acquiring shallow knowledge (like memorizing "SAT words" without actually being well-read enough to have seen or used them before) is a good thing, because it will make the test a more accurate predictor of the applicant's general level of knowledge. But simply making those test-prep tools more affordable and easier to find will only have the effect of compressing the distribution of scores, making the SAT a less discriminating test in the technical sense and thus a less useful measurement.
"But simply making those test-prep tools more affordable and easier to find will only have the effect of compressing the distribution of scores, making the SAT a less discriminating test in the technical sense and thus a less useful measurement."
What you are advocating amounts to intentional "handicap" for those who find test-prep tools expensive. Yes, you are getting higher distribution of scores. If you would single out brown eyed people and denied them access to those tools while giving them everybody else, you would get high scores distribution too.
Both tests would be just about the same useful. If the childhood leaves some less prepared to do well in college, then you do not need to add another handicap to them. They are more likely to fail even with access to those tools. If the access makes them perform better, then your "it is fair cause they are not prepared" goes out of window.
Note: I'm not saying they should not sell test prep. It is business and it is ok business to try to earn money. Just that the more expensive materials are, the less you choose on actual aptitude.
The fact that there's a natural correlation doesn't mean the SAT's correlation is identical to the natural one. And if it's worse than it should certainly try and change that.
Of course - I never said otherwise. But the changes they're making don't seem to be simply about making the test more accessible and less elitist; they seem to invite ceiling effects, and I don't see how that helps anyone.
Rather than making test prep widely available, the College Board should strive to design a test for which the only effective prep is getting a solid well-rounded education, and they should pay no attention to the complaints that some of the questions are too hard for almost anyone to answer.
I agree that, if the SAT were ideal, there'd be no way to prepare for it in particular.
However, a nationally standardized test must have consistent scores to be useful, and currently the best way to do that is to keep the general format and content consistent. That means that a student can discover and prepare for the test's general format and content in advance, which is definitely advantageous.
A truly ideal SAT would have a different format and test wildly different skills every time it's issued in order to defeat the idea of test-specific preparation, but still produce meaningful scores. I'm skeptical that such a test can produce sufficiently consistent scores, though I'm very willing to someday be proven wrong by some clever test developer. That'd be pretty neat.
So, until we create an SAT for which test-specific preparation is meaningless, it's important that test prep resources are distributed evenly so that students with good educations won't have artificially lower scores due to unfamiliarity with the SAT's standard format and content. It's an unfortunate but necessary compromise :/
