NEWSWEEK: Newsweek Talks With Discouraged High School Students Whose SAT

Scores Were Incorrectly Reported

"In Terms of Consequence, This is the Largest Mistake Ever Made on the SAT," Says Robert Schaeffer of The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Group

That Opposes Overuse of Standardized Testing

NEW YORK, March 12 /PRNewswire/ -- As if the college admissions process weren't stressful enough, last week about 4,000 students learned they had been given the wrong score on the October SAT, reports Associate Editor Ramin Setoodeh in the March 20 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, March 13). To make matters much worse, the mistake wasn't discovered until late in the application season, so the flawed scores had already been reviewed by colleges. "In terms of consequence, this is the largest mistake ever made on the SAT," Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a group that opposes the overuse of standardized testing, tells Newsweek. After last week's announcement, admissions officers all over the country scrambled to take another look at the affected applicants.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060312/NYSU010)

But the implications of the glitch don't stop there. Some students-the College Board won't say how many, only that it's "substantially fewer than 4,000"-actually received higher scores due to the error, and those won't be corrected. Chiara Coletti, vice president of public affairs at the College Board, says that wouldn't be fair to the students. Scholarships or Early Decision offers might be negatively affected if downwardly revised scores are reported, and Coletti says the board has a "policy of never penalizing a student for a factor beyond his or her control."

Since many students use their SAT scores when deciding where to apply, a handful of students who got low numbers last fall might have lowered their sights accordingly. Robert Smith tells Newsweek that's what happened to him last December. A rep from Boston University, the school he'd really wanted to go to, told him his SAT wasn't high enough, "so I got discouraged and didn't apply. Now, with the change, my math score is at the top end. I missed the early-admissions deadline. By the time I apply for admission in March, they could be full."

(Complete article can be read at www.Newsweek.com.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11788171/site/newsweek/ SOURCE Newsweek