New measures to avoid SAT flubs

The College Board announced Wednesday measures to crack down on disclosed grading errors that plagued SAT exams taken by high school students in October.

The New York nonprofit organization, which owns the SAT, also revised upward – by nearly 400 – the number of test-takers who received lower scores than they deserved.

College Board officials said that follow-up reviews have found that 4,411 students received incorrectly low scores on the college entrance exam, slightly less than 1 percent of the 495,000 test-takers in October.

Spokeswoman Chiara Coletti said the College Board has begun contacting affected students and schools by e-mail and overnight mail.

The new measures include scanning each answer sheet twice. In addition, the College Board said it will improve software to identify answer sheets that are bloated due to humidity and will take other steps to make sure that humidity problems will not again foul the scanning of answer sheets.