“But perversely, once the course becomes universally accessible, it will afford no one a positional advantage, because all will see their scores raised by the same amount.”

I think I know what you mean, but this is a pretty hard sell as written. The positional advantage in this case would be the students who have the time and energy to sift through and utilize the previous questions. And the extent to which their scores would be “raised by the same amount” would depend on the quality and success of their studying. Public domain questions would take care of most of the economic advantage (although I’m sure worried and the ever-rich would still find ways to pay for extra help) but to the detriment of those students with little time (a job? sports? family troubles?).

An imperfect analogy: In middle school (for example), students for the most part take tests where the answers are literally contained within the materials they have read. Every answer (we’ll assume it’s a multiple choice test) is a sentence in the textbook (”Biology”). Let’s pretend this means that all of the answers are in the “public domain” and available to students. Can we say that the *availability* of the book “afford[s] no one a positional advantage”? It seems that the ‘no positional advantage’ aspect comes from actually reading the book.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs. I do that.

Further, this notion of “same amount” is a question of averages (mean? median? mode?). Even if it’s true that on average, students’ test scores will be raised the “same amount”, the actual amount differs from one student to the next. The advantage seems to shift to those students who a) are prone to learn in this manner, and b) are actually helped by having sample questions in advance. Hypo: What if all students had at their disposal audio tapes of test questions? Are we leaving out the visual learners in some way?

Obviously, the goal is not perfection (as this would be an unfair standard), but the fact that making the questions public domain merely disenfranchise a different (albeit smaller) group shows the innate absurdity of (life-altering) standardized testing.

Perhaps I’m confused on the notion of ‘positional advantage’, but I took my best crack at it!

-Zach