Some students who took the January 26 Student Achievement Test at City College High School say their test scores were thrown out because of a problem that the College Board is investigating.

Olivia Chalkley said she got a phone call in mid-February from the Board, which sponsors the SATs, telling her that scores were “lost” and that she could either get her money back or re-take the test in April.

For Chalkey – a senior tackling the test a second time in a last-ditch effort to boost her scores and get accepted to the top colleges on her list – that offer doesn’t help much. By the time April scores would be released, schools will have already made up their minds.

“I’m very angry,” said Chalkley, who attends The Park School and took the test at City because it’s in her neighborhood. “Whoever’s responsible should be in big trouble because they screwed up what could be a big part of my future.”

Not Lost, but “Mis-administered”

Tom Ewing, spokesman for Educational Testing Service that administers the SAT for the College Board, today said that the tests “were not, in fact, lost,” but that “a mis-administration occurred at Baltimore City College . . . that impacted 30 SAT Reasoning Test takers.”

There were no reports of cheating or other test irregularities. Instead, Ewing said, “the associate supervisor did not follow procedures, which resulted in the mis-administration.”

Ewing said a make-up test for the students has been scheduled at Dulaney High School in Baltimore County on March 23, several weeks earlier than the information received by the Chalkley family.

No Bathroom Break

Baltimore City school officials – who emphasize that they do not conduct SAT tests but just offer their school buildings for test sites – stated that the problem apparently arose over the absence of a required “bathroom break” between two sections of the test.

According to spokeswoman Edie House-Foster, a student complained that in one of the classrooms where the SAT was conducted, test-takers were not offered a break between the administration of section 9 and 10 of the test.

“The College Board investigated and determined that the 30 students in one room where the allegation originated will be allowed to re-test the first week in April and that the remaining scores of an additional 40 plus students will be released,” House-Foster said in an email.

She also noted that ETS planned to “retrain” the proctors in “testing protocols and best practices” and will “institute a student feedback process for testing administration.”

“I Studied Really Hard”

Chalkley’s mother, Ruth Quinn, said the matter needs to be investigated and “changes made so this never happens to anybody again.”

With the College Board offering few details, Quinn said that she and her family had been left to wonder what they had meant by “lost,” and imagined various scenarios: “Did the proctor stick them in her car trunk and forget about them for weeks? Was it the fault of the SAT people?”

Chalkley said she had only taken the test once before, when she was a junior. This year, when her “early action” application to Grinnell College was deferred, she decided to retake the test in hopes of improving her math scores.

In addition to her top choice, Grinnell, Chalkley said she was also hoping she might improve her chances with one of her “reaches,” Oberlin College, where her application is still pending.

“I studied really hard for two months. I worked with a tutor. I felt like I did better this time,” the 17-year-old Chalkley said. “But now, because of this, we’ll never know if I did.”

Quinn noted that the scores might also have enhanced her daughter’s eligibility for merit-based financial aid.

Want to Skip the Breaks?

Quinn said the family wondered why the scores, which usually are posted online in about two weeks, weren’t showing up. Looking back on it, she said, there were clues the proctors at City might not have been conducting the test according to procedure.

She said the proctor asked the students, didn’t they want to skip the breaks and just keep going?

The proctor asked these questions “in a way that you could tell she wanted us to say yes,” said Chalkley, recalling that she was okay without the break at first but, by the end really needed to use the bathroom and get a snack.

“When I took the test last year at Loyola-Blakefield it was a different atmosphere – they didn’t give you an option. We just took the breaks.”

“Shrugged Their Shoulders”

Quinn said she’s still waiting to find out what happened but is so far frustrated, even after tracking down a human being to talk to at ETS.

“What infuriated me,” she said, “is the College Board has established this industry that everyone buys into – they set the standard for this test that could potentially have a major impact on somebody’s chances for college – and when they found out this happened, they just kind of shrugged their shoulders.”

There are other cases of SAT scores being thrown out due to lapses that did not reach the level of cheating. In a case last year in Brooklyn, ETS invalidated the scores of nearly 200 students because the proctors had allowed them to be seated too close together.

The testing group began stiffening its oversight following a 2011 cheating scandal in Great Neck, N.Y., where students were paid to impersonate other students taking SAT and ACT (American College Testing) exams.

– Mark Reutter contributed to this story.