<p>More than 4400 students whose tests were incorrectly scored would receive a minimum payment of $275 each. A hearing before the judge in the case is scheduled for Nov. 29.</p>
<p>This actually seems like a reaonable settlement: it's a nearly $3 million penalty to a nominally non-profit org; and students who feel that they suffered harm from the scores can petition for a higher award.</p>
<p>There's probably going to be a lot of petitioning. I feel really bad for some of those kids. There was a girl in my area whose scores were reported as being 300 points lower, so she didn't apply to a lot of places.</p>
<p>If I were a family whose student were otherwise highly qualified & it could be demonstrated that the student missed an admission to a generously endowed institution, or that s/he missed qualifying for merit aid, I'd sue for every financial aid penny, and double that for the aggravation. </p>
<p>The point is, it's not just <em>this</em> occasion. It's the carelessness & the incompetency & the "cutting corners" in so many areas, in so many ways, by CB. It's their losing paperwork; it's their hiring of uninformed clerks to save money. Being not-for-profit is not an excuse. Their role in the admissions process is (unfortunately, and inappropriately) so central to a student's acceptance that their priority should be professionalism, which it's not. If they don't have the money to be professional, they should so inform the colleges, and close up shop.</p>
<p>Yup. Settlement is for $2.85 million. I wonder how much the attorneys are getting paid.</p>
<p>$275 per student is really peanuts. I agree with epiphany. If I were one of the affected students, I'd sue for a whole lot more. And it took CB two years to come to this settlement, meaning it was fought all the way.</p>
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wonder how much the attorneys are getting paid.
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<p>That's actually in the article . . . a maximum of $900,000! That's as bad as CB's treatment of the students.</p>
<p>It would not have come to $900,000 if CB had not fought so tenaciously. By the time the students get some money, it won't be much more than the cost of actually taking the test.</p>
<p>The members of any class action suit always seem to get pennies, and the attys get millions. What a joke.</p>
<p>CB's non-profit designation is a joke. They make money hand over fist. From what I've been told, the non-profit designation has to do with how the corporation is structured, and concerning the making of money, the differences between for-profit and non-profit can be pretty nuanced. Some people, under the guise of non-profit are making a killing. Someone correct my understanding, please.</p>
<p>This settlement does NOT address CB's SNAFU last summer when they LOST hundreds of AP exams...and gave the students the option of 1) taking a refund or 2) re-taking the test in the fall. My D's college accepts AP scores for acceleration credit by semester only. They lost the AP exam (actually just 1/3 of the exam) for her AP Music Theory. She could not re-take the exam in the middle of Fall semester of her freshman year at college, so she opted for the refund...which the CB did not send for another 9 months and only after repeated certified letters and phone calls. She learned THIS summer that because she lost that score (which she was sure was a 5), she lost an entire semester of acceleration credit. At over $30K per year tuition, that's a loss of $15K from us!!!!</p>
<p>^^Ouch! That hurts, quiltguru. Sounds like a class-action suit waiting to be filed....</p>
<p>It's interesting to me now, looking back as the parent of a S about to start grad school, how instrumental the SAT was in setting his current course. While we all know that high scores are not some magic bullet, we also know their importance as a part of the total package in admissions. I'd like to submit for consideration their possible importance as a motivator. </p>
<p>My S was a full-time college student and dual-enrolled as a HS junior when he first took the SAT. He had planned to graduate two years early with a double major in science. Other colleges were not even on his radar screen until he took the SAT unprepped and saw the result. (Aside: The CB screwed up that year, too, and temporarily "lost" the majority of PSAT results for months and months; so my S got his December SAT score long before he got his October PSAT score. If he hadn't been required to take the SAT pro forma for admission by the college, he probably wouldn't have even taken it until much later in the school year.)</p>
<p>I truly believe the SAT score sent a signal and helped confirm for his profs the ability they were seeing in the classroom. Two of them to whom he was particularly close actively encouraged him to apply to more selective colleges and mentored him through the process of broadening while refining his career goals.</p>
<p>I can't help wondering if lurking somewhere among those 4400 kids is at least one (the girl in ses' post?) who might have been otherwise helped as my S was. What are fair damages for opportunity lost?</p>
<p>Thanks for the comments, folks. I agree with all of you.</p>
<p>Sounds tough, and obvously no one will be happy with every aspect of the settlement. There is no going into the past to make it right, only what can be said is a fair effort to make whole students affected by the low scores now. Personally, I have no sympathy for the % of students that opted not to apply to various schools because of the score. Much along the lines of a fair effort, I'd ask "how many times did you take the test? Was this really your only opportunity to take it?" Good planning dictates a student take the test a number of times and report his best score. "Why didn't you do that?" And lastly, Disappointed in your score, you opted not to even try for the school you preferred? How smart is that? I know it's easy to see, looking back, that it wasn't smart. Some would still have been accepted, and those who weren't might have a better legal case now. It is one thing in court to show damages- you applied but weren't accepted because of low (flawed)scores, compared to student didn't even try. How can a student who didn't try prove why? It would appear the student had no interest, didn't try, and now is trying to sue his way in.
Most of us have been running late for an appointment, or maybe left at the last possible minute, then during our drive got delayed by a train or an accident. I know I've said I was late due to train, but really that was just an excuse. If I left at the last minute possible, and depended everything to go perfectly on my journey, then I had poor planning.<br>
My heart goes out to those who tried but may have been turned down by (defective) scoring. But to those who just threw up their hands and said "No point in even trying?" I cannot feel bad for.</p>
<p>While there are many things I do not like about the College Entrance Examination Board, I don't agree that its non-profit status is a "joke." Founded in 1900, the CEEB is a MEMBERSHIP association composed of more than 5,000 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. It has been a non-profit since 1942. Some confusion seems to stem from the collegeboard.com that was originally a for-profit venture until it was folded in the mother organization.</p>
<p>As much as I sympathize with the families and students who have incurred lossed because of testing problems, it may be good to remember that the TCB relies on the organizational support of ... high schools to organize the testing. Year after year, we hear horror stories of incompetent proctors who are unable to follow the simplest of guidelines. Well, those people are your usual school teachers and administrators ... not full-time employees of TCB or ETS. Why would it be to anyone's surprise that the people who screw up our K-12 education might be responsible for yet another snafu?</p>
<p>Further, it is obvious that bashing TCB/ETS is a favorite activity in this forum, despite that the complaints are rarely as founded as one might think. Also I have to admit not to be able to follow how a single AP score might cost anyone as much as half a year of tuition. Aren't AP creditable to ONE course or ONE semester of one course? Does the loss of one AP score cause the loss of entire semester? </p>
<p>Lastly, it is not hard for anyone to check the financial reports and tax returns of the CCEB and ETS and ascertain the extent of their financial gains, and the impact of the SAT testing on their net revenues.</p>
<p>No, xiggi, not at my D's school. APs are not credited at all on a course by course basis. They are good for placement on a course by course basis, but not for credit. The ONLY way the student receives credit is if they have a total number of 4's or 5's (depends on the exam and department) that = what the school believes is a semester's worth of work. Then you get credit for the entire semester. If my D had the AP Music Theory as a 4 or 5, she would have had enough AP's to receive "acceleration credit" for an entire year. The lack of the AP Music Theory score left her one short for a year's worth of credit. She had more than enough to receive credit for the one semester she may accelerate...but one exam short of accelerating an entire year. It nipped in the bud her desire to complete her BA and her MA in 4 years. And means we will have to foot the bill for tuitition, room, board and expenses for an entire extra semester.</p>
<p>P. S. Her university is not the only one who operates on an "acceleration credit" basis. Also, fortunately, the lack of the score did not hinder placement in Music Theory. After taking the school's music theory placement exam, she placed out of two semesters. But did not receive credit for them.</p>
<p>"Further, it is obvious that bashing TCB/ETS is a favorite activity in this forum, despite that the complaints are rarely as founded as one might think."</p>
<p>AP exams lost? Scoring errors by the hundreds, and by hundreds of points? Major screw-ups when it comes to paperwork deadlines for testing accommodations? Sloppiness extending beyond the U.S., to Canada? All that equals "rarely founded compliants"? I don't think that would accord with a mathematical approximation of "rare."</p>
<p>For the second year in a row now, the GC's in this country are fuming that the fall test registration deadline is looming, yet CB has not provided the highschools with the proper fee waiver forms, which always must be current (not last year's). Students who really have to wait for these are now being further compromised, as what's being left of their site choices may not be what their family can drive to, etc. Our GC recently told me that "many colleges," as she put it, view CB as simply "incompetent."</p>
<p>The CB is way overwhelmed & unable to keep up with the scope of their own activity. The volume of students needing their services is beyond their obvious ability to manage these needs. They should regionalize and/or suggest to the colleges that partnering with others for services would improve the service level. Oh, but wait: that would eliminate their monopoly.</p>
<p>I agree with Epiphany here. In the past, complaints were rarer than they are now, and for a good reason, which Xiggi has written about before.
1. The change over to the new SAT which involved, inter alia, training readers to score the Essay section.
2. the massive expansion of the AP program.</p>
<p>These two issues overwhelmed the CB's and ETS ability to process tests efficiently and accurately. The CB contracted out to Pearson which was also affected by the massive expansion of testing resulting from NCLB.</p>
<p>So while in the past, complaints against the CB were not as frequent as they have become in the last few years, unless greater resources are made available to administer and process exams, we can expect more snafus.</p>
<p>Epiphany, a closer look at my sentence: "Further, it is obvious that bashing TCB/ETS is a favorite activity in this forum, despite that the complaints are rarely as founded as one might think." would reveal that I was talking about complaints on THIS site.</p>
<p>When I joined more than four years ago, I read many complaints about the SAT on the SAT forums. A large numbers of the complaints were rooted in people's misunderstanding of the operations of the College Board. For instance, a regular complaint related to the tardiness of getting the PSAT scores. In almost all cases, the delays were caused by the HIGH SCHOOLS that were sitting on the results.</p>
<p>Nobody disagrees that AP exams were lost and that scoring errors were made. Nobody disagrees that this represented a major annoyance to families and students. I also agree that the excuses offered by TCB might not "cut it." However, I maintain that those errors are --and were-- not as universal as people pretend them to be, and that a lot of BS regarding "errors" has been passed as facts.</p>
<p>Now, I'll admit that your comment, "Our GC recently told me that "many colleges," as she put it, view CB as simply "incompetent." brought a smile to my face. A smile of pure derision, that is. GC commenting on the incompetence of others? Colleges declaring the CB incompetent? Should we compare the stories of TCB losing test scores with the stories of GC forgetting to mail crucial information on time, missing important deadlines, and colleges misplacing applicants' forms? And this does not address the blatant lack of current information or knowledge from that group of "qualified" administrators. Mirror, mirror on the wall ... </p>
<p>PS Have you noticed how little complaints there are about the ACT. Yet, this organization could be a poster child for having the clumsiest and most arcane procedures, starting with the dumbest online tools. Have you ever tried to RE register for a test without being prompted to enter the same RIDICULOUSLY IRRELEVANT questions? </p>
<p>The lady doth protest too much, methinks. And others too :)</p>
<p>xiggi, your arguments hold little validity with me. Students are not REQUIRED to journey through a GC in order to apply to colleges. Many do not. Many of those see clearly that their own GC may be (check all that apply: incompetent, overworked, underinformed). Other GC's are great, and serve their students spectacularly. Nevertheless, those without such great GC's come to CC and/or other sources, or do it themselves. Such is not possible when it comes to standardized testing required of the overwhelming number of U.S. colleges (& even overseas ones). One cannot send in one's own "official score report." It will not be read, it will not be accepted, it will not be entered into the file.<br>
Our GC may be mediocre herself. (She is.) However, she gets the paperwork right. Strictly speaking, this is all she's "required" to do, from the point of view of the highschool who hired her. She's an administrator. So is CB, if only they'd do the job for which millions of students & families pay them, for services NOT rendered.</p>
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However, she gets the paperwork right. Strictly speaking, this is all she's "required" to do, from the point of view of the highschool who hired her.
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<p>Getting the paperwork right makes her a remarkable GC in MY book. As far as the validity of her opinion, I think you described it better than I could when you selected your adjectives to "qualify" the GC.</p>
<p>You think that TCB does a horrible job. I think they do pretty well considering the millions of documents they process. </p>
<p>What difference does it really make? I was not trying to sway you with my arguments. We have different opinions and we based them on our different experiences, don't we?</p>