It's not as exciting as Sandy Berger stuffing top-secret documents down his pants, but here's another tale of documents inadvertently going missing:
For the second time in two years, the company that administers advanced placement exams at Walter Johnson High School reported that a group of answer sheets are missing. As a result, halfway into their summer vacations, 44 students may be forced to retake exams they took back in May...
On July 9, [25] students received letters from ETS (Educational Testing Service) informing them that the multiple-choice portions of their AP Psychology tests were missing and unlikely to be found. The letter offered the students two options: Take a new version of the multiple-choice section at no charge or cancel the grade and receive a refund. According to the letter, the students have until Friday to respond.
Another 19 exams were reported missing last week for a total of 44.
Out of 3 millions exams given, 44 isn't a huge number, but missing tests are like homicides. Ideally, there'd be none, and for each one, there's an anguished victim or set of survivors, not to mention a lot of news coverage. The school claims to have followed ETS's mailing instructions "to the letter." And other schools in the same county have suffered similarly within the past couple of years. No one seems happy with ETS's offer to refund money or assign students to a retake, but it's understandable why ETS isn't comfortable with projected scores (due to validity and reliability issues) or with just giving students credit for all the lost items (validity and reliability issues and the potential for abuse by unscrupulous schools).
Is there a way out of this standoff? Not likely, not with the mailing back and forth of 3 million packages every year. Even if the tests were all on computer, that kind of data can vanish, too.
Posted by kswygert at July 23, 2004 02:14 PM