SAT Scoring Fiasco

Class Location: The Internet.

Description: This class describes a scoring mishap on the October 2005 SAT's.

High school seniors across the country and the colleges they apply to rely on the College Board to, at the very least, accurately grade the SAT. But the fiasco that ensued following the October 2005 administration of the test has cast much doubt on the College Board, the scoring process, and the testing industry.

Nearly half a million high school students took the SAT on October 8, 2005. All the answer sheets were then sent to Pearson Education Measurement in Texas for scanning. However, some of the answer sheets had apparently gotten wet, making the bubbled-in answers hard to read and resulting in inaccurate recording of answers on more than 5,000 test sheets.

As of July 2006, no investigation has been able to reveal the source of the contamination, as the affected answer sheets came from 30 different states. The College Board, Pearson, and the Educational Testing Service, which translates the number of correct answers into official SAT scores, all missed the error. However, after receiving their test scores, a number of students complained that they were inaccurate. Over the following weeks and months, hand scoring and rescanning ultimately revealed that 4,411 test-takers were scored too low and 613 were scored too high.

When they finally learned about what happened, test-takers, admissions officers, guidance counselors, and advocates of test reform called the incident a fiasco. The New York State Senate Higher Education Committee held a hearing to investigate. In its testimony, FairTest asked the committee to require test-makers to return scored exams to test-takers and establish an oversight panel to monitor industry performance. The committee drafted a bill that incorporated these recommendations, and the legislature will likely consider it later this year. Laws regulating test taking in New York have historically become national practice.

Meanwhile, the test-takers who received incorrect low scores have filed a class-action suit against both the College Board and Pearson. The plaintiffs have charged the defendants with breach of contract, negligence, violations of consumer protection laws, and more, seeking compensation for damages and the immediate correction of erroneously high scores. A drawn-out lawsuit will likely ensue, but regardless, the entire standardized testing industry has suffered a great loss of credibility.