That little oops continues to make negative press:
The College Board disclosed a new problem yesterday in its efforts to assess and correct mistakes in the scoring of its October SAT test: an overlooked batch of 1,600 exams that have not been checked for errors.The admission that there were still unchecked tests came a week after the board began notifying colleges that it was raising the SAT scores of 4,000 students whose tests had been graded incorrectly because of processing problems at a Texas scanning facility.
The revelation meant that colleges were likely to face a second scramble to reassess additional applicants just as the admissions season was drawing to a close.
This is just ugly. So ugly, in fact, that I'm wondering why this story was released last week before the full picture was known internally. It's very hard to understand why a testing organization would report an error before accounting for all possible test forms that could have been affected.
The error was first uncovered January 31st, when exams were hand-scored at the request of students. It's only Mar 15th. Six weeks is not a lot of time to investigate a scoring problem on an exam given to half a million students. Did the College Board feel pressure to rush to the press with the announcement of the mistake? It's good that they now appear to be disclosing everything they find, but this sort of trickling information makes the public wonder what it hasn't been told, and in fact, if the College Board even realizes the extent of the problem.
It also causes news organizations to start using words like "scandal," rather than error.
Posted by kswygert at March 15, 2006 12:05 PM