Schools Correct Suspect Scores On SAT Test

When Howard County school administrators were calculating the average score each high school received on the new writing portion of the SAT last month, the figures they came up with were as much as 53 points lower than what turned out to be the correct numbers, a spokeswoman for the school system said yesterday.

The largest difference was at Glenelg High School, where the school system first reported an average score of 486 on the writing test. The students who took the test actually averaged 539 points. The average difference at other schools was nearly 13 points.

According to Patti Caplan, the schools spokeswoman, the error occurred because they included students in the Class of 2006 who might have taken the old SAT -- without the writing test -- earlier in their high school careers. When the statisticians were figuring each school's average, they put in a zero for students who didn't take the writing test. In schools where many students had taken the old test, this dragged down the schools' averages considerably.

Caplan said that the mistake was limited to the writing test and that the individual scores received by students were correct. So were the average scores for the whole county, which were calculated by the Educational Testing Service.

"Everything's cool," Caplan said. "We've got the new scores on our Web site."

Staff writer Joshua Zumbrun contributed to this report.