Additional SAT Errors Discovered

The College Board acknowledged on Wednesday that SAT errors were larger than previously disclosed.

As of last weekend, 27,000 exams from October 2005 had not been rechecked for error, the College Board said earlier this week.

Three hundred seventy-five exams were found to have been scored too low, bringing the total number of erroneously lowered SAT scores to 4,411, up from 4,000. The scores also have a discrepancy of up to 450 points—not 400 as previously reported.

But Harvard admissions officials said yesterday that the repeated screw-ups by the College Board will not cause the admissions office to reconsider its use of the SAT in its decisions.

“We really do not make admissions decisions based on scores,” Director of College Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’71-’73 wrote in an e-mail. “We use them to understand various other aspects of an applicant’s achievements—we are unlikely in the near future to use scores very differently.”

The College Board only discovered the 27,000 exams after asking Pearson Educational Testing, the company that scores the SAT, to confirm that all October tests had been rechecked, according to Brian O’Reilly, the executive director of SAT information and services for the College Board.

O’Reilly added that finding the 1600 additional misscored exams two weeks ago caused the College Board to question Pearson’s thoroughness in the first place.

The original 4,000 wrongly scored SATs were detected after two students asked for their own tests to be rescored by hand.

Pearson Educational Management has outlined in a statement the steps it has taken to ensure future scoring accuracy, including scanning each answer sheet twice.

Sharon Cuseo, the upper school dean and college counselor at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, said that the repeated discovery of new errors made her question the integrity of the College Board.

“There should be full disclosure,” she said. “The first time they said there were only a certain number of students affected, but now it seems a little more nebulous.”

McGrath Lewis also stressed in an e-mail that the College Board should maintain accuracy in testing.

Cuseo suggested that creating an outside auditor of college standardized testing would help ensure accountability.

“It would reassure our students and families if there were some more clear set of checks and balances for the scores” Cuseo said.

Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, disagreed with this proposal. Calling the SAT “a market driven institution,” Reider said that the College Board has a strong incentive to fix its own problem to remain relevant.

“They can do it themselves, the same way that when a car company product malfunctions, the company usually bends over backwards to fix the mistake,” Reider said.

Reider said that he believed that the real problem was not the scoring mistakes, but rather a college’s dependence on a test that does not reflect a student’s high school work.

But Reider added that he thought the admissions status quo at larger schools like Harvard was not likely to change.

“I think the schools that are already questioning it and are unhappy with testing, this will add fuel to that,” he said. “But there are a lot of schools that are very dependant on this like the big universities...[Harvard] won’t abandon the SAT anytime soon. ”