In March of this year, more than 250,000 high school students sat for the SAT test, a college entrance exam that for many is also a rite of passage. It’s a high-stakes exam — many colleges give SAT scores disproportionate weight when deciding on which students to admit. And that’s why the March exam was particularly stressful. As the College Board, the organization that administers the exam, explained, “some students’ tests were automatically submitted before their testing time was complete due to an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook, College Board’s digital student testing app.” For those students — numbering at least 10,000 and maybe twice that — the exam was more stressful than they expected for reasons beyond the questions themselves. The College Board did what they could to make it up to the test takers, as explained on that link. But the story demonstrates the point that, when it comes to standardized testing, sometimes things go wrong — and when they do, those problems often impact lots of students.

And in one case, it resulted in millions of dollars in damages.

Many states require high schoolers to pass standardized tests in key subjects to graduate. Minnesota is one of those states, and for years, a company called NCS (later acquired by Pearson Education and renamed “NCS Pearson”) was responsible for scoring the state’s standardized tests. And it turned out, in 2000, they didn’t do a great job — to say the least. A May 2003 paper (pdf) published by the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy explained the situation (internal citations omitted):

In May of 2000, the daughter of a Minnesota lawyer learned that she had failed the math portion of Minnesota’s Basic Standards Tests (BSTs), a test published by National Computer Systems (NCS). Her father contacted the Department of Children, Families and Learning (CFL), asking to see the exam. For two months CFL staffers rejected his request and “told him to have his daughter study harder for next year’s exam.” Only when the parent threatened a lawsuit did CFL permit him to examine the test. 

The father, along with employees from CFL, found a series of scoring errors on Form B of the math test administered in February 2000. The errors were later traced to an NCS employee who had incorrectly programmed the answer key. As a result, math scores for 45,739 Minnesota students in grades 8-12 were wrong. Of these, 7,935 students originally told they failed the test actually passed. Another error involving a question with a design flaw was found on the April administration of the BSTs. NCS invalidated this item, but not before 59 students were erroneously told they had failed.

By that point, though, much of the damage had already been done. As Minnesota Public Radio reported, “some seniors were wrongly denied diplomas” and some  “students [were] excluded from high school commencement or […] dropped out” after learning they “failed” the exam. A student named Jake told the New York Times that “to try to salvage his diploma, he had to give up a promising job and go to summer school. ‘It changed my whole life, that test,’ Jake recalled.” Another student, Jimmy Dressen, was impacted by the errors on both exams, costing him a job. As the Chicago Tribune explained, Dressen had a job lined up as a pipefitter post-graduation, but “the job required a diploma, but Dressen was barred from receiving one after failing the state’s basic standards math test in February and April.” The lawsuit, therefore, moved forward.

Ultimately, the families of the impacted children settled with NCS Pearson. Per the Washington Post, the judge found “years of quality control problems” and a “culture emphasizing profitability and cost-cutting” at NCS were likely to blame for the bad result; the testing company forked over $11 million to make up for the error. About $4 million went to school districts to compensate them for unspecified harm caused by the scoring errors; the other $7 million went to the impacted students themselves, with awards ranging from about $300 to as much as $16,000. And perhaps unsurprisingly (although you never know!), Minnesota canceled its contract with NCS.

More About Math Tests

Today’s Bonus fact: If you go north from Minnesota, you’ll end up in Canada. And if you enter a sweepstakes there and win, your math education may come in handy. As Mental Floss explains, “The Canadian Competition Act bans all games of chance, with the exception of provincial lotteries and those held at licensed casinos.” But there’s a loophole. Mental Floss continues: “Contest officials figured out long ago that if they require a correct answer to a tricky question as part of their entry, their sweepstakes is no longer considered a game of chance.” Math problems are commonly used because, as Wikipedia’s editors explain, “a court decision ruled that a mathematical [Skill Testing Question] must contain at least three operations to actually be a test of skill.” So 2+2 wouldn’t fly, but (2×2) + (2/2) would.

From the Archives: Burger Math: The hamburger-turned-math test that too many consumers failed.