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Class-Action Lawsuit to Be Filed Over SAT Scoring Errors

Correction Appended

Three Minnesota law firms have begun a class-action lawsuit against the College Board and one of its contractors over scoring errors for thousands of students who took the SAT last October.

Papers were served Friday for a suit in state court in Hennepin County, Minn. Officials say it is the first legal action in the matter; a handful of other firms have expressed interest in the case.

The College Board disclosed last month that 4,411 students out of about 500,000 who took the SAT reasoning test in October received incorrect scores. The errors were partly due to moisture that interfered with the scanning of the students' answer sheets by Pearson Educational Measurement, the company that handled that part of the scoring for the College Board. Pearson's parent company, NCS Pearson Inc., is based in Minnesota.

"The College Board contracted with Pearson despite the fact that Pearson is no stranger to botching test scores," the 48-page complaint said.

The board said most of the students received scores that were too low, some by as much as 450 points of a maximum possible 2,400, and those scores were being corrected. It also said that about 600 students received scores that were too high, by as much as 50 points, but that under board policy, those scores were not corrected.

Some college admissions officers have criticized that policy, which the board has said it is reviewing.

Chiarra Coletti, a spokeswoman for the College Board, and David R. Hakensen, a spokesman for Pearson, said yesterday that they could not comment on the suit.

T. Joseph Snodgrass, a partner at Larson King in St. Paul, one of the three firms bringing the suit, said the lead plaintiff was a high school senior from Dix Hills, N.Y., on Long Island, who received an incorrect score when he took the exam. The student was not identified in the suit.

Mr. Snodgrass said yesterday that the firms planned to seek an injunction requiring the College Board to correct the inflated scores as well as those that were too low.

"It is unfair that regular students have to compete against those students with inflated scores for admission, scholarships and financial aid," Mr. Snodgrass said.

The suit defined two classes of students: those who received mistaken scores "and everybody else who has to compete against the students with inflated scores," he said. That may amount to millions of students who applied to college this year, he said.

Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a group that says standardized tests are relied on too heavily, said more than half a dozen other law firms were working on similar suits.

"Our hope is that this lawsuit will finally get to the bottom of what really happened," Mr. Schaeffer said, "and why it took so long for the College Board to make the problem public."

The board has said it was alerted to the problem by two students who questioned the scores they received in December; after finding that their tests were misscored, the board investigated and learned the problem was widespread.

The three law firms -- Larson King, and Zimmerman Reed and McSweeney & Fay, both of Minneapolis -- joined in another suit against Pearson over a misscored state test in 2000 that kept some students from graduating with their class. In 2002, Pearson settled it for $12 million, with about $7 million for students and $4.5 million in lawyers' fees.

Correction: April 11, 2006, Tuesday An article on Sunday about a class-action lawsuit over the faulty scoring of some October SAT exams misspelled the given name of a spokeswoman for the College Board. (The error also occurred in an article on March 23.) The spokeswoman is Chiara Coletti, not Chiarra.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 1, Page 33 of the National edition with the headline: Class-Action Lawsuit to Be Filed Over SAT Scoring Errors. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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