ANNA KING
Assistant News Editor
In October, about 495,000 high school seniors completed the SAT test in preparation of their applications and decisions about their future college careers.
However, last week 4,000 of those students found their scores, which is a deciding factor on the school they are accepted to, reported their scores as lower than they actually achieved, some by more than 100 points.
In a year that was marked with enhanced apprehension for graduating seniors taking the SAT test, due to the change from a 1600-point based test to 2400 points and an added writing section, the scoring error was of concern to the suppliers of the SAT test.
“When we found out about the problem, we figured out what caused it and made sure that it was isolated to the October test,” said Brian O’Reilly, executive director of SAT information services. “We then ran all the answer sheets back through the scoring machines. We had determined which students had been affected in February, and last Monday sent messages to all admissions office notifying them of the problem. We then sent the corrected score reports themselves to the students.”
For Pepperdine in particular, Michael Truschke, associate dean of enrollment and director of Admissions, said 14 of the school’s 7,000 applicants were among those affected, but only one had a score that was ultimately altered by about 100 points. The remaining applicants’ scores were affected by between 10 and 20 points.
Letters and phone calls notified the Pepperdine Admissions office of the problem Friday.
“We immediately updated the admission files of the students affected,” Truschke said. “All of the files were then reviewed again to insure that the applicants were reviewed with the correct SAT scores.”
However, the score changes did not have an immediate and direct affect on Pepperdine’s admission process, as the Admission Office notification deadline is April 1.
“Because the notifications have not been mailed, the decisions did not have to be publicly recalled in order to review the file again,” Truschke said. “None of the original decisions were changed after reviewing the files with the corrected SAT scores.”
The College Board, which is the owner and distributor of the SAT achievement test, reported in a press release that the point discrepancy was the result of a technical processing error, of which the affected students did not receive credit for answers that were marked correctly.
“To the best of our knowledge, some answers sheets were ‘moist,’ probably from humidity, and there was enough moisture to expand the paper,” O’Reilly said.
Additionally, the College Board reported that the majority of the scores that were reported differed by fewer than 100 points across all three sections of the test.
Of the 4,000 tests affected, 83 percent were between 10 and 40 point differences. Only 12 percent had differences of 50 to 90 points, and only 5 percent incurring a 100 point or more difference in score.
Students who were affected by the point discrepancy were notified by e-mail and mail last week. Admission offices received notification last Friday. They will be mailed corrected scores, and will be refunded their registration fees and charges for sending test scores to colleges, O’Reilly said.
While most students’ scores were reported not in their favor, some student’s scores were reported higher than they actually received after the corrections were made. However, the College Board reported that their policy was not to make any changes to those scores that were too high and only to report the scores that were too low.
“The reasoning behind that decision was that there was nothing students could do about it, and that they were acting on good faith when reporting to colleges that that was their score,” O’Reilly said. “We thought it would be unfairly penalizing those students.”
College Board officials said the scoring anomaly is a one-time error and only affected those students who took the October 2005 SAT Reasoning Test.
To insure that the problem does not occur again, the scoring vendor, Pearson Education Measurement, has assured that it has instituted a quality control where the machine is now able to assess a difference in the paper size, which would allow them to catch a similar issue and know that it was a problem, said O’Reilly.
03-16-2006