Students in New York breathe a sigh of relief, as their missing SATs turn up in the possession of a man who inadvertently took them home with him.
The students, all from the over-achieving Ardsley public schools, were already freaking about having to retake:
Officials of the Ardsley public schools broke the bad news to 123 high school students on Thursday that the SAT exams they took on Saturday had disappeared from the district office. The answer sheets from the exam were in an eight-pound Federal Express envelope on a counter, awaiting pickup on Monday morning. But when the FedEx employee arrived at the office, no one could find it, said Richard E. Maurer, the superintendent of schools...
"Right now I'm very frustrated because I don't know how it left the building," Dr. Maurer said. "I'm very upset and I've apologized to the students and the parents." School officials contacted the Ardsley Police Department about the missing tests, but Dr. Maurer said he did not suspect any mischief...
Between class periods on Thursday, guidance counselors quietly summoned the students whose answer sheets had been lost to tell them about the disappearance. Among them was Derek Weingarten, a 17-year-old junior, who took the SAT I on Saturday, after having just taken it in May, scoring a respectable 1,230.
Mr. Weingarten said he wanted to raise his overall score on the June 5 exam so that he could have a carefree senior year. "I was hoping for a 1,300, and when I came out of the exam I felt I had reached my goal, if not more," he said. "For the test to be gone now is just very disappointing."
Guess what? Mr. Weingarten may have still have that carefree senior year, thanks to the fact that the absentminded SAT "thief" did the right thing and returned the still-sealed exams:
The SAT exams that mysteriously disappeared from the public schools here earlier this week were found on Friday morning when a man called the schools superintendent to say, a bit sheepishly, that he had inadvertently taken them home...
In a telephone interview, Dr. Maurer said the package was completely intact. He would not identify the man who mistakenly took the package, other than to say that he was not a resident of Ardsley. As the mistake was explained by Dr. Maurer, the man had gone to the school district offices on Monday to pick up some other materials, had put down his own papers on a secretary's desk and grabbed the eight-pound SAT package, which was awaiting pickup by FedEx, when he went to retrieve his papers. When the man learned from news reports that the exams were missing, he discovered that he had them.
The guy didn't notice he was carrying an extra eight pounds? Sheesh.
At 10:45 a.m., the high school principal, Dr. James Haubner, made an announcement over the public address system that the SAT's had been found - a piece of news that elicited loud cheers among students...
Tom Ewing, a spokesman for the Educational Testing Service in Lawrenceville, N.J., said that because of the prompt return of the package, there "shouldn't be any delay whatsoever" in grading the exams and reporting the scores.
Posted by kswygert at June 15, 2004 10:08 AM