In response to the recent misscoring of thousands of SAT exams, the College Board has changed its policy and will now scan answer sheets twice, among other new precautions.
The change comes following the miscalculation of 4,411 tests, representing nearly 1 percent of the 495,000 students who took the newly reformatted SAT, which replaced the old 1,600-point scale with a 2,400-point version.
Most of the tests taken on the Oct. 8 testing date were in the Northeast, where the region was experiencing increased amounts of rainfall. According to a release from Pearson Educational Measurement, a company that scans the answer sheets, abnormal amounts of moisture in the air caused the answer sheets to expand enough that the grading machines were not able to read them correctly.
The recent miscalculations have affected applicants all over the country, including 94 applicants at Johns Hopkins University, whose scores had been altered by an average of 30 points.
But some maintain that errors in testing are not abnormal.
"The fact is that the differences [in scores], for the vast majority, were within the standard deviation range between 30-40 points, which is what we would normally see," said William Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services at JHU. "The SATs are never looked at as an exact score."
Conley also said that because JHU does not have a rolling admissions process, all errors could be properly addressed, but he acknowledged the difficult task for the College Board, which owns the SAT.
"The College Board is not infallible, and these things can happen," Conley said. "There is kind of a witch hunt because the general conversation is if testing is relevant or an appropriate measurement of student success."
One group involved in this conversation is Fair Test, a watchdog group that focuses on evaluating standardized testing, holding such tests accountable to fairness and validity standards.
"Our stance has long been that [standardized tests] should not be required but optional in the admission process," Robert Schaeffer, public education director of Fair Test, said. "This fiasco demonstrates again that tests are far too imprecise and too subject to error — both human and mechanical — to be used as the primary factor in making important education decisions."
Yet admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison requires official scores from either the SAT I or the ACT test and also requires that they come directly from the testing agency.
The College Board notified UW March 7 of 42 applicants whom it believed were affected. Of them, 19 had been admitted, eight denied and 15 had either withdrawn their applications or had never applied to UW.
But Tom Reason, associate director of admissions at UW, said that in spite of any score change, UW made the correct decision.
"We have dealt with all these cases," he said. "It really proved to us to be an insignificant non-issue."
Despite the inconsequential impact these recent errors have had on some schools, Schaeffer cited past errors in standardized testing and warned of lawsuits.
"In Minnesota in 2000, several hundred students were falsely told they failed the [high school] graduation test," he said. "Pearson settled for $10 million. [After these recent errors], we expect multiple lawsuits and Pearson having to pay again."
In order to prevent future technological problems, the College Board has hired the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton to perform a comprehensive review within 90 days.
