College Board to turn over SAT report

MINEOLA — College Board executives have agreed to release a report on scoring errors in the SAT college entrance exam after a state senator warned last week they were risking a contempt charge. “Rather than standing on its legal objections, the College Board has decided to produce” the report, a board statement said. The decision came after Sen. Kenneth LaValle, chairman of the state Senate Higher Education Committee, issued a subpoena on July 10 seeking to compel College Board President Gaston Caperton, a former two-term governor of West Virginia, to disclose what is in the report at a hearing on July 14 at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. More than 4,000 high school students nationwide received incorrect scores on the SAT they took in October because of a computer glitch. In its July 13 statement, the board asserted that confidentiality of the report was protected under New York law but agreed with the senator that they “should not be debating legal issues and technicalities.” The board said it had to vet the report for confidential and proprietary information before releasing it, possibly July 24. In May, LaValle’s committee questioned College Board executives as it sought to require the nonprofit association to detect and report errors faster so students weren’t again given inaccurate low scores. The College Board, based in New York City, had said its study of recent problems in SAT scoring wasn’t yet a final report and was exempt from the state law. The College Board gave the test Oct. 5. In December, two students asked for a manual re-scoring of their tests after they disputed their scores. Trouble was first revealed publicly in early March, followed by two announcements in subsequent weeks about problems re-scoring the exam. The disclosures forced many colleges to reopen admissions files just as they were trying to make final decisions. Eventually, the College Board reported 4,411 of the 495,000 October test-takers received incorrectly low scores, 83 percent of them off by 40 points or less on the 2,400-point exam. One score was off by 450 points. The College Board collected $500 million in revenue last year and administered 9 million college entrance exams.