Eighteen Center Moriches high schoolers were notified by the director of test-taking advocacy for Educational Testing Service (ETS), a testing agency that administers the Advanced Placement exams, that the company had lost their U.S. history essays. Director Debra J. Rice apologized for the “unfortunate circumstances.”
The students were offered three options: retake the free response portion later on, get a refund and cancel the results, or accept a “projected score” based on the multiple choice portion of the exam. While the projected grade benefits some students, many are disappointed that half their exam will remain ungraded.
Advanced Placement is the nation’s largest administrator of college level courses and exams in high schools. College Board, a non-for-profit college resource for high school students based in Manhattan, sponsors AP exams, while ETS oversees the logistics. It is still unknown how exactly the essays were lost. According to news reports, Superintendent Russell Stewart has said the packages containing multiple subject exams were marked with tracking codes before being shipped.
According to the company this is an “isolated incident,” and the agency grades more than 50 million answer sheets from the exams they administer annually. In 2006, following an incident where ETS lost 168 Canadian students’ exams, an ETS spokesman, Tom Ewing, acknowledged exams go missing every year for a variety of reasons, including warehouse loses.
There is a bright side. If all 18 students accept the projected grade option, the average exam score will be a 3.4, .4 points higher than last year, the Superintendent pointed out.
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