15 students dropped from pass to fail but will not see their scores changed
Fifteen students in the Guilderland Central School District may have just had the best summer vacation of their lives without even knowing it.
The district announced today that 504 of the Regents exams students took in June were graded incorrectly nearly one in six tests and that new grades would be going out on all but 15 of them. Those incorrect scores will be retained because they would push a previously passing grade down to a failing one.
If the tests had been scored correctly, those students probably would have spent the summer studying for the August retake.
`It is not in my world view to penalize students on a teacher error,` said Superintendent Marie Wiles at a press conference today.
She added that the failing scores would not have affected anyone’s graduation, but could throw off a student’s progress since they didn’t have the opportunity to go to summer school and retake the test.
`They would potentially need to double up on coursework,` Wiles said. `These students are typically the ones that struggle the most.`
The August Regents tests are being given today and tomorrow across the state.
The errors were all made in scoring the multiple choice part of the Regents, where students fill in bubbles on a separate card that can then be fed into a machine for tabulation. This was the first year the state required schools to submit those cards for electronic grading, but it also offered schools the option of hand-grading them before their submission.
That’s the route Guilderland took because there were concerns about whether the district’s software was compatible with the state’s, Wiles said. Replacing the software would cost several thousand dollars, on top of the $2.10 per test fee the state now charges for the mandatory scanning. Guilderland administered 3,163 tests in June.
The errors amounted to tabulation mistakes, Wiles said. Scores were incorrectly tallied, and mistakes were also made in converting raw scores into the final grade. Teachers of the subject being tested generally grade the exams.
Most of the mistakes made a difference of a few grade points in either direction, but the district acknowledged there were larger errors, some resulting in differences of more than 10 points.
`We’re trying to understand how this could have happened,` Wiles said, adding, `Teachers are human.`
There were no mistakes found on the long answer portions of the tests. The problem was found Aug. 8, when the results from the state’s scans of the answer sheets were compared with district records.
Letters will be going out next week to the parents of all students who took a Regents exam in June. A new score and report card will also be sent if a correction is being made.
The district will not longer be grading the multiple choice section of the Regents by hand, opting instead to send them out for electronic scanning. Since this was the first year the district’s sent the tests out, it was not immediately clear if similar mistakes were being made in past years.“
