Scholastic Assessment Test

University of California regents Wednesday gave preliminary approval to a controversial change in freshman admission standards that would drop the requirement for two SAT subject exams and make more students eligible for a review of their applications while guaranteeing entry to fewer. The change is considered among the most sweeping admissions policy shifts by the university in years.

The addition of a mandatory writing section to the SAT three years ago slightly improved the exam's ability to predict academic success for college freshmen, according to a report by the test's owner. The study, sponsored by the College Board, also found that scores from the new writing section were somewhat better at predicting grades in the first year of college than the other two SAT sections.

About 4,000 students who took the main SAT college entrance test in October received incorrectly low scores because of errors in scanning their answer sheets, the College Board said Wednesday. The board, the New York-based nonprofit that owns the high-stakes test, said the problem affected less than 1% of the roughly half million students who took the exam that month.

High school seniors and their parents, along with college counselors and admissions officers, have been roiled by recent disclosures that at least 4,600 SAT exams taken in October were graded incorrectly. But education testing experts point out that similar mistakes have happened before -- and inevitably will happen again. "Tests are a fallible product," said Kathleen Rhoades, a research associate with the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy at Boston College.

The College Board on Wednesday announced measures to avoid a repeat episode of the grading errors that plagued SAT exams taken by high school students in October. The New York-based nonprofit organization, which owns the SAT, also revised upward -- by nearly 400 -- the number of test takers who received lower scores than they deserved in the initial grading.

As a new wave of high school students prepares to take the SAT exam Saturday, officials are scrambling to correct recently disclosed grading flaws that have spurred fresh criticism of the test. The problems, which marred 5,000 SAT tests in October, have given students, parents and admissions officials yet another reason for anxiety over the pivotal college entrance exams. Some 375,000 students, including 54,600 in California, are signed up for Saturday's SAT.

A high school senior whose SAT was incorrectly scored low is suing the board that oversees the exam and the testing company that was hired. The lawsuit, filed in Minnesota, is the first since last month's announcement that 4,411 students got incorrectly low scores and that more than 600 had better results than they deserved on the October test. It names the nonprofit College Board and the for-profit Pearson Educational Measurement, which has offices in Minnesota's Hennepin County.

Steps including better software and more training -- and even providing pencils and erasers at test centers -- could improve the reliability of scoring the SAT, a consultant's report says. The report, commissioned by the College Board, says the scoring system for the college entrance test has improved since more than 4,000 of the tests taken in October were given incorrectly low scores. On the whole, scores are reliable, it says.

The nation's high school class of 2006, the first to take a new, longer version of the SAT, posted the sharpest drop in scores on the widely used college entrance exam in more than three decades, test officials said Tuesday. Leaders of the College Board, the New York nonprofit that owns the test, said the decrease was partly due to some students choosing to take the high-stakes exam just once instead of twice or more.

Writing, Audrianna Galvin says forthrightly, has never been her strong suit. So the teenager was more than a little anxious when makers of the SAT college entrance exam announced in 2002 that a revised version of the test would, for the first time, include a handwritten essay. "The whole idea of the writing section just really freaked me out," said Audrianna, 16, a junior at the private Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. "I thought, 'How on earth could I do that?'