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Colleges scramble amid SAT glitch

''Unless you spend a lot of time in a high school, you can't appreciate how crazed students can get about this stuff," Kelly said. ''To learn very, very late in the game that there might be an error is just going to exacerbate that."

Error lowers test scores of 4,000 hopefuls
By Marcella Bombardieri and Tracy Jan,

Globe Staff March 9, 2006
College admissions officers in Massachusetts and elsewhere yesterday scrambled to deal with the applications of thousands of students whose SAT scores were too low because of a technical glitch, one of the biggest mistakes ever made on the high-stakes exam.
Many universities, including the most selective schools, do not finalize admissions decisions until the end of the month, but are well along in the process. Officials at some schools, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said they had already mailed out some acceptances and rejections. They will reexamine the applications of students who were affected by the College Board's mistake to see if the outcome would have been different.
Another worry, high school counselors say, is that students might have given up on applying to certain highly competitive schools because of the faulty scores, and now they have missed the deadline to apply.
Officials at The College Board, which administers the test, said technical glitches led to errors in roughly 4,000 students' October 2005 tests, resulting in some students not getting credit for some of their correct answers. The company, which is still investigating what happened, relies on computers at a facility in Austin, Texas, to scan students' answers from test sheets. The errors were reported yesterday in The New York Times.
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