Additional Detail about October 2005 SAT® Scores
An investigation ordered by the College Board concluded that a technical processing matter that occurred during the scanning process at Pearson Educational Measurement, caused by humidity in combination with the light or incomplete marking of answer sheets, affected a very small percentage of October 2005 SAT takers.
The College Board deeply regrets any anxiety and inconvenience that this problem caused students, their families, and our members, particularly those in the admissions community.
Initial rescanning results showed that approximately 4,000 students (0.8 percent of the SAT Reasoning Test™ takers who tested during that administration) of the 495,000 students who took the SAT in October 2005 did not receive credit for some correct answers. These students were notified and were able to access their revised scores online. The scores were higher than originally reported. All high schools and colleges in this group were notified, as well.
Approximately 600 test-takers from the October 2005 administration would have had negative score impacts due to this issue. The vast majority of these would have been small changes. These were not re-reported to colleges. The College Board's policy is not to disadvantage students for technical problems, which are beyond their control. If some students did not take the SAT again because they were satisfied with their scores as reported, they can never get that opportunity back.
Additional Information
The College Board continued efforts to make sure that we had identified all students possibly affected by the October 2005 SAT scanning problem. As a result of those efforts, we confirmed on Monday, March 13, 2006, that approximately 1,600 additional answer sheets were not rescanned at the same time as the other 495,000 because they were being reviewed under a special exceptions process at ETS. These answer sheets were rescanned by Pearson and all resulting revised scores were reported to students, colleges, and schools.
Timeline for Analysis and Notification
The College Board first became aware that there might be an issue in late January 2006 when two routine requests to hand rescore October tests resulted in positive score changes. These hand score requests were received from students in December 2005. Requests to hand rescore tests can be requested by test-takers and are a routine procedure that customarily takes three to five weeks to complete.
An investigation was immediately launched to determine why the two test results needed to be adjusted and an issue related to the answer sheets and scanning was indicated. Pearson Educational Measurement, the vendor that scans the answer sheets for us, then launched its investigation. Following a vigorous inspection involving 1.5 million exams from not only the October 2005 SAT administration but also the November 2005, December 2005, and January 2006 exams, it was determined that the scores reported for approximately 4,000 students who sat for the October 2005 administration were lower than they should have been.
As soon as we were confident of the results and had determined the scope of the problem and identified the affected students and institutions, we promptly reported the results to all schools, colleges, and students.
An enormous amount of work was undertaken to ensure that we investigated and analyzed this event thoroughly. We worked as quickly as possible to re-report scores by early March 2006, so that the higher scores could be reported as soon as possible.
We are refunding the test registration fees and any other fees associated with sending scores of students affected by this anomaly from the October 2005 SAT Reasoning Test administration.
Pearson has assured us that they will continue to investigate the cause of the situation. They created a software program that looks specifically for evidence of paper expansion at the time an answer sheet is scanned and have implemented a process to allow answer sheets more time to acclimate to their scanning operations. Additional measures may be put in place as the Pearson investigation progresses.
The processing of the April 2006 SAT scores went smoothly. In scoring the April SAT, we implemented a series of enhanced quality controls, including scanning each answer sheet twice, on different days. Our scanning vendor, Pearson Educational Measurement, reported to us that they did not see a repeat of the problem experienced in October 2005. As a result, we want to assure students and schools that they should maintain the high level of confidence that they have always had in scores from the SAT.
