College Board Says 4,000 SAT Scores Wrong

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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<p>More data:
" Of the 4,000 teenagers impacted:</p>

<pre><code>* 83 percent will see their score rise 10 to 40 points
* [12] percent will see their score rise 50 to 90 points
* 5 percent will see their score rise 100 points or more
</code></pre>

<p>The student most impacted by the problem will see their score increase by 300 points.</p>

<p>The 4,000 erroneous scores accounted for 0.8 percent of the teenagers who took the October 2005 SAT."
<a href="http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=316&sid=720180%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=316&sid=720180&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Miserable for that 5%. Running, I would definitely tip off the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal--400 points is unbelievable, and far more than the College Board is willing to indicate.</p>

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<p>it's already in the NYT.
And 300 point increase?! Wow O_O freaky.</p>

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<p>could SAT2 scores be affected?</p>

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<p>It could have been worse- 300 point drops!</p>

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<p>So- considering the way this has been handled by CB, do we really believe those stats posted by dulce2?</p>

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<p>are all of the affected students notified by now?</p>

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<p>Boy, check out this latest article from the NYT:
"Officials Say Scoring Errors for SAT Were Understated"
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/education/09sat.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/education/09sat.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Now the College Board says mistakes were as high as 400 points (I guess that explains Running's situation) after mischaracterizing it before. And the College Board official I spoke to today misinformed me when he said that the only mistakes gave people artificially low scores--now they say some of the test scores were too high.</p>

<p>That corporation is miserable...when I called a few months ago to change test centers, the representative cussed me out (and dropped an f-bomb in the process). But I guess that's besides the point.</p>

<p>I would really like to see a collective sense of outrage to shut the College Board down. And for all of their services to us, FairTest describes the CB's head's pay as such:
"College Board President Gaston Caperton, a former insurance salesman who served as Governor of West Virginia, a state with among the worst educational systems in the nation, received $478,547 in salary, $76,806 in benefits and deferred compensation, and a $110,000 expense account. Tellingly, Senior Vice President for Finance, Janet Winkler, received even more in salary: $504,072 plus $49,973 in benefits. Three other College Board VPs topped the $300,000 annual compensation level, and 19 others averaged more than $200,000 for the year."</p>

<p>And they get tax benefits on top of that as a non-profit.</p>

<p>They have been ripping off students for years and now they're screwing over thousands. It's time for them to go.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
when I called a few months ago to change test centers, the representative cussed me out (and dropped an f-bomb in the process).

[/quote]
</p>

<p>THAT merits a firing. Write a letter to the president of Collegeboard demanding that this representative be fired or threaten to tip off the New York Times about this. It'll cause such a PR fiasco that they'll be forced to fire this person anyways, AND will give them a bad name.</p>

<p>It really IS time for them to go.</p>

<p>Oh yah, about the 400-point discrepancy...I hope someone was fired for that. If I was president of Collegeboard (this job would suck) HEADS WOULD ROLL. That alone merits multiple firings. CB employees need to be held to the highest standard as they virtually hold the futures of millions of teenagers in their hands.</p>

<p>I'm utterly shocked that nobody's been fired for this. 4000 is a lot of tests to mess up. It's not like rocket science: you input the answers in the scantron machine, then you put the scantrons thru the machine that grades it, then print out score reports. I could do this without making a mistake. And I once said that the square root of 2 plus the square root of 3 equaled the square root of 5.</p>

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<p>UPDATE : Short report about SAT snafu on CNN.</p>

<p>Robert Smithville of Brentwood, California and his parents were interviewed. He applied to Boston University and was rejected based on his scores which are NOW 80 POINTS higher which NOW put him on the upper % range of accepted students. </p>

<p>Mom wants to know what took Collegeboard so long to notify everyone. She said she is furious.</p>

<p>James Montoya, a representative for College Board said that colleges have been notified.
NY Institute of Technology, Jaquelyn Nealon was interviewed as 'frustrated" college counselor who wants to know what took collegeboard so long to notify.
Robert will reapply to Boston University and says he is Very disappointed and said this is unneeded stress. (understatement of all time) </p>

<p>Here is the most newsworthy part of that blurb. </p>

<p>Collegeboard can't pinpoint the exact problem and they don't know why it occured???? </p>

<p>Stay ...............................tuned ....................</p>

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<p>The really sad thing is that some errors can't be rectified. When son's October scores came in and were much higher than his early ones, he readjusted his list and applied to some reaches that before had not been realistic. If this had happened to him, he would have lost that opportunity.</p>

<p>The sad fact is that you can ask schools to go over existing applications again, but you can never give back the chance that was taken away.</p>

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<p>The sad thing is that nobody within Collegeboard was fired. If I was rejected because my score was reported 1800 instead of 2200, I would want to see some heads roll (maybe the president's) within Collegeboard.</p>

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<p>It looks like they've made a lot of effort to cover up their mistake, and who knows how many mistakes have they covered up successfully...</p>

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<p>Got an email yesterday-120 point increase in my score.</p>

<p>Luckily, I already had a decent score (1990) in the bank from last year, so, unlike many kids, it wasn't a big deal.</p>

<p>Imagien how horrible it would be to be rejected because of an error by the cash cow that is the CB?</p>

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<p>I really hope CB gets sued and in a lot of trouble. They better properly refund those effected, and I don't mean by giving them the little amount of money it costs to take the test. This is rediculous.</p>

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<p>are the notifications done now? im still waiting for my nonexistent higher score >_></p>

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<p>When will the online scores be changed if they were wrong? I took the SAT in October, and I am from NJ. I know that I am probably not affected by the error, but it would be nice...</p>

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<p>Updated story on CNN:</p>

<p>"At the very least, the error was a major headache in admissions offices, who thought they were through the busiest part of the year. At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, admissions director Kevin Kelly had finished printing and started mailing more than 12,000 decision letters when he opened his own mail to find a 13-page roster of students whose scores had been reported incorrectly.</p>

<p>"On March 7, to get this packet of information is a little startling," Kelly said. "Most of my immediate reaction is not printable."</p>

<p>The affected students appear to be clustered in the Northeast. At the University of Vermont, 107 applicants' scores were affected, though most by just a few points, dean of admissions Don Honeman said. By Wednesday afternoon, Honeman said his staff had already reconsidered them all. One student who had been denied was admitted, and three others were bumped to a higher scholarship level.</p>

<p>Colleges in other regions seemed less affected. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill had 71 affected applications, the University of California, Berkeley had 32 and the University of Georgia four. Earlham College in Indiana had five, but all had already been admitted.</p>

<p>The College Board said differences were less than 100 points, out of a total possible score of 2,400, for the vast majority of affected students.</p>

<p>Error fuels critics of test
Several college officials credited the College Board for its thorough response -- three entire sittings of the exam were rescored -- but others said they should have been notified sooner, and some were sharply critical of how the news was conveyed.</p>

<p>"As the party who screwed up you have a responsibility to fess up to the problem and provide a clear explanation," Dennis Trotter, dean of admission at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, wrote in a letter to a College Board official.</p>

<p>Critics of the SAT called the error the latest in a long line of shortcomings by the nonprofit College Board."</p>

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<p>hopefully this sends a stronger message to admissions officers that the accuracy of such tests in the admissions process is less reliable than they thought. SAT tests should be relied upon almost as much as interviews are-- that is to say, as a ball park indication but not much credence.</p>

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<p>just ridiculous, collegeboard is a huge bureaucratic company that never responds to calls and i assume they are very corrupt, this was probably a leak, they probably messed up many times before, non profit organization my butt, these guys make billions every year, sat around 42 dollars, sat and ap scores sending is like 9 each , ap tests are 82, on top of that they sell books and online courses, they're not kidding anyone, class action suit is needed,</p>

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<p>I found it's such a big relief for me now! For the past 3 months I have been fighting alone with collegeboard. I did mention my hard time in contacting collegeboard to some of my friends who also have college bound children but non of them felt my pain.</p>