SAT printing glitch zeroes out a section of test

Greg Toppo | USATODAY

A tiny printing glitch that surprised SAT test-takers across the USA last weekend won't affect their scores, the College Board said on Monday.

Officials said students taking the test on Saturday were surprised when proctors' scripts said they had just 20 minutes to complete one of the test's sections — either a math or reading section, depending on which version they took.

Students' test books told them — incorrectly, it turned out — that they had 25 minutes to complete the section.

Test administrators began calling the College Board, and by Monday it had apologized and said it wouldn't score the affected sections.

College Board spokeswoman Kate Levin said the group expects to deliver scores "within the usual timeframe," and noted that the test is designed to accommodate a "wide range of incidents that can impact a testing experience," from fire drills and power outages to mistiming and disruptive behavior.

She added, "school-based test administrations can be fragile, so our assessments are not."

Both the reading and math tests included three equal sections with roughly the same level of difficulty, she said, so that if one section is thrown out, "the correlation among sections is sufficient to be able to deliver reliable scores."

She suggested students visit a web page set up to explain the scoring at: www.collegeboard.org/june-6-sat.

James S. Murphy, a tutoring manager for the Princeton Review, told The Washington Post that "students across the nation" got exam booklets with the printing error. Murphy said one high school junior from New Milford, Conn., told him that when he got to the section, "he knew something was wrong since he'd taken the exam twice before … He pointed this out, and the proctor asked what other people's exam books said. About half the people in the room had 25 minutes for Section 8."

A test supervisor said the problem was taking place in other classrooms, too. "It turned out that the extent of this problem was much wider and was in fact nationwide," Murphy said.

On Twitter, one student named Emily Gerard tweeted on Monday: "if they invalidate the june SAT im going to jump off a bridge." But minutes later she amended her complaint: "im not taking the SAT again if they invalidate it im just sitting back and accepting my fate."