Posted on Mar 10, 2006
With just weeks left for colleges to decide who to accept and reject, several Capital Region schools have been caught in a snafu involving 4,000 miscalculated SAT scores.
As a result, there's a last-minute scramble to ensure affected students get a fair shot at one of those coveted thick acceptance letters.
“It's created a lot of work that no one was anticipating,” said Michael Parker, a spokesman for the University at Albany, which got word a couple of days ago that it was sitting on 150 erroneous scores.
Earlier this week, the College Board, which administers the tests, acknowledged about 1 percent of the students who took the exam in October received scores lower than what they actually earned. The board notified both students and schools of the problem.
Most of the scoring mistakes were between 10 and 40 points, according to published reports, although some ran as high as 200 points. The highest possible score is 2,400 points.
Admissions officers were combing through files to determine whether they need to adjust any admissions decisions.
Dan Lundquist, dean of admissions and financial aid at Union College, said the school received 40 wrong scores, less than a percent of its applicant pool.
“Our view is that this is of 100 percent importance to each applicant,” he said. “Not 'less than 1 percent' of a problem.”
Most of the errors were in tests taken in New York, New Jersey and California. Siena College received 48 wrong scores, and The College of Saint Rose received three.
Two of those Saint Rose applicants were accepted, so the change made little difference. But the third had been rejected — and now Saint Rose will go back and see whether the extra 50 points coming the applicant's way would make a difference.
“Kids … feel so tense and challenged during this time, anyway, they really don't need anything like this to happen to them,” said Mary Grondahl, the school's vice president of enrollment management.
When students take the SAT, they can ask the board to forward their scores to schools, or they can pass the scores along themselves. The board notified schools of errors only if it passed the initial score along — raising concern among some that colleges don't know of all the problems yet.
“We're really going to have to rely on students calling us,” said Robert Andrea, UAlbany's director of undergraduate admissions.
Lundquist said students who didn't rely on the board “could fall through the cracks.”
High schools might also start hearing from affected students in coming days.
“It's so fresh, we don't even know yet,” said Albany city school district spokesman Ken Rawley.
Not all of the wrong scores received by colleges necessarily translated into an application. Sometimes, students will send scores to a school, then decide against applying.
Besides the obvious concern of determining whether any rejected students should have been admitted, Andrea said score changes could also affect scholarship eligibility.
“If your scores are in a certain range, it might mean money to you,” he said.
The mistake could heat up the eternal debate over the value of standardized testing.
“It's a serious, serious issue,” Grondahl said. The best way to handle it, she said, is to take an applicant's entire file into account — and use a test score to prove consistency, or a lack of it.
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