July 12, 2006
Senator Subpoenas College Board President Over SAT Errors
By KAREN W. ARENSON, NY TIMES

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The chairman of the State Senate’s Higher Education Committee said yesterday that he had subpoenaed the president of the College Board to try to force him to disclose a report on scoring errors involving more than 5,000 SAT exams last October.

In response to those errors, the committee’s chairman, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, introduced a bill calling for increased oversight of college admissions testing. It was passed by the Senate in June, but not by the Assembly. The senator plans to reintroduce it.

The board had commissioned the report from Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting company, in March, to be delivered in 90 days. It promised several times to publicize it. Recently, however, board officials said they would not release it because of litigation involving the scoring errors.

Chiara Coletti, a board spokeswoman, questioned yesterday whether the board’s president, Gaston Caperton, would appear at a public hearing on Long Island on Friday, as the subpoena ordered, and whether the board would deliver the report.

“It was a very broad subpoena on very short notice,” that was delivered on Monday evening, she said. “It would be very difficult for anyone to comply with it.”

She added that Mr. Caperton was scheduled to be at a College Board conference in Florida on Friday.

But Senator LaValle, who sponsored “truth-in-testing” legislation in New York in the late 1970’s, said he was not willing to change the date of his hearing because the board has been so uncooperative.

“Unless they make a legal motion to quash the subpoena, I’m expecting him to be there,” he said. “In making public policy, we need to ensure that what happened in 2005 does not happen again. The public needs to be apprised of what happened and of how we fix it. “

College Board error brings lawsuit
Posted 4/9/2006 9:20 PM

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An unidentified high school senior in Dix Hills, N.Y., whose SAT was scored low incorrectly is suing the College Board and a testing company it hired to scan the tests and manage essay scoring.
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in Minnesota, is the first since the College Board notified 4,411 students last month that their scores from the October test were too low. The suit seeks class-action status for the students, asking for unspecified damages and an order that the 600 tests that were incorrectly scored too high also be adjusted.

SAT SCORING: How it's done

After discovering the errors, the College Board corrected the low scores last month but did not adjust scores that were too high.

"Any type of a high-stakes test that impacts a life event like college, scholarships and financial aid has to be scored with 100% accuracy," St. Paul attorney T. Joseph Snodgrass said Saturday. "There is no room for error in this type of a situation."

Snodgrass' firm won a multimillion-dollar settlement from Pearson Educational Measurement, the company the College Board hired to scan the tests and score the essays, in 2002 for scoring errors in Minnesota that affected more than 8,000 students.

Pearson spokesman David Hakensen said Saturday that the company won't comment on pending litigation. College Board spokeswoman Chiara Coletti also declined to comment.


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Gaston Caperton
From Wikipedia:

Caperton was embarrassed when his first wife, Dee Caperton, divorced him during his first term, and unsuccessfully ran in the election for state treasurer. With Dee he had two boys, Gat and John Caperton, who are both married and living with their children in West Virginia (Gat) and California (John). It is thought that his first wife was responsible for his love of apple crisp. His second wife was the Musical Director and Conductor of the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, Rachael Worby. He is currently married to his third wife Idit Harel Caperton, an Israeli, MIT PhD, an education technology expert, a mother of three, and the Founder and CEO of MaMaMedia. They live and work in New York City.

W Gaston Caperton III

Director at
Prudential Financial, Incorporated
Newark, New Jersey
FINANCIAL / LIFE INSURANCE
Director since June 2004

66 years old

Gaston Caperton was elected as a Director of Prudential Financial in June 2004. He has served as the President of The College Board (nonprofit membership association of schools, colleges, universities and other educational organizations) since 1999. He was the founder and executive director of Columbia University's Institute on Education & Government at Teachers College from 1997 to 1999 and a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics from 1996 to 1997. Mr. Caperton served as the Governor of West Virginia from 1988 to 1996. Prior to his governorship, Mr. Caperton was an entrepreneur in the insurance business and was one of the principal owners of a privately held insurance brokerage firm. Mr. Caperton's areas of expertise include insurance, public policy and education. Other Directorships include: Owens Corning. Age 66.

Idit Harel Caperton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Israeli-American researcher and entrepreneur
Idit Harel Caperton, Ph.D. (born September 18, 1958 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an educational psychologist and epistemologist specializing in the study of the impact of computer-based new media technology on the social and academic development of children. Her research, along with that of Seymour Papert, has contributed to the development of constructionist learning theory, a hands-on approach to the use of technology as a tool in juvenile education and acculturation.

She is the founder and CEO of MaMaMedia Inc., the executive director of the MaMaMedia Consulting Group (MCG), and founder and president of the World Wide Workshop Foundation. Additionally, Caperton is an advisor for several non-profit educational initiatives and is a regular featured speaker at universities and educational conferences worldwide.

SEED Connectivity

About Papert
The developer of an interesting and original vision on learning called Constructionism, built upon the work of Jean Piaget (Constructivism). Rethinks how schools should work based on these theories of learning. Also focuses on the impact of new technologies on learning in general and schools as a learning organisation in particular.
Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language. He created Logo as a tool to improve the way that children think and solve the problems. A small robot called “Logo Turtle” was developed and children have been encouraged to solve the problem with Logo turtle. A main purpose of the Logo Foundation [1]research group is to strengthen the ability to learn the knowledge. Seymour Papert insists a language or program that children can learn does not have to lack functionality for expert users.
Papert is one of the principals for the One Laptop Per Child initiative to manufacture and distribute the $100 laptop in developing nations.
Has been called (by Marvin Minsky) "the greatest living mathematics educator" [cover of Mindstorms]
A proponent of the Knowledge Machine.
Worked with Jean Piaget during the 1960 and is widely considered the most brilliant and successful of Piaget's proteges. Piaget once said that "no one understand my ideas as well as Papert." [Direct Observation]
Influenced Alan Kay and the Dynabook concept.
Created the Epistemology & Learning Research Group and the MIT Media Lab
Influenced the research of Idit Harel Caperton - collaborated on research grants and published together articles, and the book Constructionism; and has been the Advisory Board Chair of her company MaMaMedia.
A collaborator with LEGO on their Logo-programmable Lego Mindstorms robotics kits.
Influenced the work of Uri Wilensky in the design of NetLogo and collaborated with him on the study of knowledge restructurations.
Influenced the work of Andrea diSessa and the development of dynaturtles.
Was a leading figure in the revolutionary socialist circle around Socialist Review while living in London in the 1950s.

Related articles about the Testing Errors:
WEEK IN REVIEW DESK
IDEAS & TRENDS; Nobody's Perfect. Neither Is the Test.
By KAREN W. ARENSON (NYT) 825 words
Published: April 2, 2006

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THE incorrect scoring of 5,000 exams from the College Board's October SAT is a reminder that testing is not an exact science. But just how inexact is it?
The October errors occurred, in part, because some answer sheets had become damp and did not register correctly when they were processed.

Testing companies try to guard against errors where they can. The Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., for example, which works on some tests with the College Board, has 700 people working to insure technical quality in test development. They scrutinize even small details like whether the size of the print on a page or the resolution on a computer screen affects performance.

'You decide what you want to measure, and then you have to make sure you are not measuring something else, like poor vision,' said Ida M. Lawrence, senior vice president of research and development at the testing service.

Despite such efforts, problems crop up. Here is a sample.

Missed a line. A student racing through a multiple choice exam may skip a line on the answer form by mistake, and then put every answer that follows on the wrong line.

In a study of more than 100,000 SAT exams, computer scientists found that nearly 2 percent of the test takers made such mistakes. One of the study's authors, Steven Skiena, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said such errors could be identified by computer so that the student received what he called an appropriate score.

'If you can detect what they were thinking, you should score them for that,' he said.

The College Board, which calls the practice 'mis-gridding,' says students should tell their proctors when they make such mistakes, and that their scores may be corrected. Of 1.5 million SAT tests taken last year, only about 100 students reported the problem. Or if they move quickly, they can simply cancel their scores.

Bear down. A New York City student who received a score of about 1800 on the SAT last June out of a possible 2400 took the test again in October, hoping to do better.

The student, who asked that her name not be used because she did not want other people to contact her, said her score plunged 360 points.

So she paid to have her October test scored again, by hand, an option that the College Board offers. Her score shot up 510 points.

The board said she had marked her answer form so lightly that the machine processor could not read many of the answers.

Missed a page. A Maryland student who was allowed to type his responses to the essay portion of an Advanced Placement exam because he had a disability, earned a 1, the lowest possible score on a scale of 1 to 5. When his exam was scored again by hand, his score jumped to a 5.

His mother, Judi Becker, said an official at the Educational Testing Service told her the typed pages, which had been appended to the regular answer sheet, had been overlooked, making it appear that the student had answered only two of the four essay questions.

Tryout questions. Proposed new questions are inserted into real tests for a tryout. Even though the questions do not count, they can throw students off, said W. James Popham, an emeritus professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who has also worked in test development.

'Some of these previously untried items are bloody awful, occasionally having no right answers at all,' he said. 'The test taker doesn't know that this is a 'no-count' item and, therefore, might be traumatized by being unable to answer it.' Though not a frequent problem, he said, it does occur.

There are other testing problems that have less to do with external factors like paper and pencil and more to do with what goes on inside a student's head.

Thomas M. Haladyna, a professor of educational psychology at Arizona State University, said there was a range of everyday issues like test anxiety (a quarter of the population has it, he said), fatigue, lack of motivation and language problems for students who are not native English speakers.

'Test scores can easily be corrupted,' he said. 'You shouldn't trust a test score unless it is validated with other information that corroborates it.'

With so many problems, are there any protections? Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, which argues that tests are relied upon too heavily, recommends that when possible, students get copies of questions and answers, 'both as a check on scoring accuracy and to learn from their mistakes in case they retake the exam.'

'The unfortunate truth is that the fates of students -- and their parents -- are at the mercy of the testing industry,' Mr. Schaeffer said. 'Absent mechanisms for oversight and regulation, we have to hope they get it right.'

NATIONAL DESK
Colleges Say SAT Mistakes May Affect Scholarships
By KAREN W. ARENSON (NYT) 769 words
Published: March 26, 2006

LINK

At many colleges, the biggest impact of the mistakes made by the College Board in scoring the October SAT will be on eligibility for scholarships, not on admissions decisions, college officials say.
'With admissions, the colleges say they are practicing holistic review,' said Donald E. Heller, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University and an expert in student financial aid. 'But with scholarships, some use flat cutoff points with the SAT score. They say if you score above 1,200 or 1,800 on the SAT, you are eligible for a scholarship. If you don't get that score, you don't get that scholarship.'

Jennifer Topiel, a spokeswoman for the board, said on Friday that the board recommended that scores not be used that way.

But the reality is that they are used like that in numerous college and statewide scholarship programs. Dr. Heller said he found in a recent study that 7 out of 14 states that offered broad-based merit scholarship programs used specific SAT scores to determine awards, usually along with students' grade point averages. And, he said, many colleges that offered their own merit scholarships did the same.

Over the past two weeks, the board has revealed that because of technical problems in scanning the October exam, the scores of more than 5,000 students were inaccurately reported. It notified colleges of corrections for 4,411 students whose scores were too low -- by as many as 450 points out of a possible 2,400 -- but is not making changes for 600 other students whose scores were too high.

Christine A. Halloran, an assistant director of admissions at the College of New Jersey, called the scoring revisions a 'nonevent' in terms of admissions because much of the decision-making 'is based on the strength of the academic transcript.'

But she said that under the state's merit scholarship program, which is tied closely to how students perform on the SAT, about five students would receive better scholarships because the board had raised their October scores.

The New Jersey program offers a sliding scale of scholarships that depends on a student's class rank and SAT scores. In-state students in the top 5 percent of their graduating classes, for example, are eligible for full tuition, room and board, plus a laptop computer, if they earn a combined score of 1,500 to 1,600 on the math and reading portions of the SAT. If their scores are from 1,450 to 1,490, they receive tuition, a laptop and a $2,000 stipend; from 1,400 and 1,440 they receive $6,500 and a laptop. Those with lower scores receive less. The amounts diminish for students with lower class ranks.

Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pa., which does not have a set cutoff for scholarship eligibility but takes the SAT scores into account, had one applicant whose score correction of more than 300 points meant the difference between a $5,000 scholarship and one worth $12,500.

'I know it is really hard for the public to understand why 50 points can make a difference,' said Dennis Trotter, a vice president and dean of admissions. 'But when it comes down to it, we might be looking at 200 students who might qualify for these scholarships, and they go head to head. There are a lot of intangibles. One of the quantifiable things is the SAT score, along with the high school record. A swing of even 80 or 100 points on the SAT could mean the difference between the highest-level scholarship or not receiving one at all, because it is all so competitive.'

Still, some students say the revisions to the test scores do not compensate them for missed opportunities.

Jake DeLillo, a star lacrosse player at Yorktown High School in New York, received recruitment letters from more than 50 colleges last year, and he was particularly interested in colleges like the University of Massachusetts, which had strong lacrosse programs. But, he said, some of the coaches told him that his spring SAT scores were not high enough, and he needed to raise them about 100 points to be considered.

When he took the October SAT, he thought he had done well -- until he got his scores. The results forced him to shift his search to other colleges, and he was accepted by the New York Institute of Technology, last year's national Division II lacrosse champion. Mr. DeLillo said he was looking forward to attending.

Two weeks ago, he said, the College Board told him it had understated his October results by 170 points. 'It was definitely upsetting,' he said. 'People make mistakes, but this was a big one.'

More SAT Errors are Discovered, and More College Scholarships are at Risk