Remember how I said yesterday that it's difficult enough to report a testing error, but it's really embarassing to report an error too early and then have to amend that report?
A day after the College Board notified colleges that it had misreported the scores of 4,000 students who took the SAT exam in October, an official of the testing organization disclosed that some of the errors were far larger than initially suggested. With college counselors and admissions officials scrambling to take a second look at student scores in the final weeks before they mail out acceptances and rejections, Chiara Coletti, the College Board's vice president for public affairs, said that 16 students out of the 495,000 who took the October exam had scores that should have been more than 200 points higher."There were no changes at all that were more than 400 points," Ms. Coletti said. She did not say how many students had errors that big...On Tuesday, Ms. Coletti characterized the largest errors as in the 80- to 100-point range.
As I said before, I don't see a problem with the time it took to investigate the scoring error. It's not wonderful that the error was uncovered by students requesting score checks, instead of via a QC process, but that happens in the real world. What could have been avoided, though, was the two-part error reporting here, where the public discovers on the second day that the initial error report understated (or otherwise mischaracterized) the severity of the problem. The cause might have been simple - incorrect information provided to the public affairs VP - but it can have a really ugly PR affect. Things like this convince the public that the testing company is not providing the full picture.
Posted by kswygert at March 9, 2006 11:19 AM