<p>When Daniel Sonshine, a senior at Brown University, took the Medical College Admission Test on Saturday, he was asked to read a passage on robotic fish in the verbal reasoning part of the exam. Then he was presented with a series of questions about songbirds.</p>
<p>This was not a trick question; it was an error.</p>
<p>“I was completely distraught,” Mr. Sonshine said yesterday. “I was struggling to stay focused, but I was not focusing.”</p>
<p>He was probably not alone. About 800 students who took the exam, known as the MCAT, encountered the mistake.</p>
<p>Another kind of problem surfaced in the College Board’s SAT exams, also given this past weekend. At least one student in South Korea had a part of the test before it was taken by 326,000 other students, according to the Educational Testing Service, which handles security for the exam. Raymond Nicosia, privacy protection officer for the testing service, said it was working with investigators in South Korea to find out “what the student had and who else had it.”</p>