Student, principal catch MCAS error

By James Vaznis, Globe Staff

Massachusetts education officials informed school districts statewide today that MCAS math scores for 70,000 10th-graders were reported incorrectly, two days after a Westwood High School principal and a Newton North High School student informed the state about an error.

Their notification, which earned the student a personal thanks from the governor, caused the state to move up the performance levels of more than 3,000 10th-graders.

Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, emphasized that its testing contractor, Measured Progress, calculated the raw scores accurately but then scaled them incorrectly. The 10th grade math exams were the only tests affected by the mistake, Chester said.

“Needless to say, I’m not very happy to learn about this,” Chester said. “We need to take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Both the Westwood principal and the Newton North student reported the error to the state by coincidence Wednesday.

Michael Safran, 16, a Newton North junior, spotted a problem with his math score shortly after he received his results by mail earlier this week. He said he was flipping through a pamphlet that accompanied the scores to see what area he got wrong on the math section, and noticed he may have lost more credit for the incorrect answer than he should have.

Safran, who only got one question wrong on the math test, then went to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website to examine how the raw scores were converted to the scaled scores. According to the chart, his score should have been converted to a perfect scaled score.

On Wednesday, he called the education department to report the problem. Today, his father -- Alan Safran, a former state deputy education commissioner -- stopped by school to tell him he had uncovered a major problem that the state was now working to fix.

“I never would have expected that my small inquiry would make such a massive difference for tons of kids across Massachusetts,” Michael Safran said.

Shortly afterward, Newton North’s principal, Jennifer Price, pulled him out of his biology class to take an important phone call: Governor Deval Patrick wanted to personally thank Michael for bringing the error to the state’s attention.

“He told me I made a huge difference for thousands of students across Massachusetts,” Michael recalled. “He said it was a great thing I did. ... It was surreal to speak with the governor of Massachusetts.”

The scaled scores are used to determine the placement of test takers in four performance categories, advanced, proficient, needs improvement and failing/warning. The state scales the scores each year because different questions are used each year, creating slight variations in overall difficulty.

The error caused the state to move up the performance levels of nearly 3,251 tenth-graders to proficient or advanced.

No student who failed the exam ended up with a revised score that bumped them into needs improvement. No test-takers ended up with a worse performance category because of the error.

Chester said he has asked Measured Progress, which is based in Dover, N.H., to provide a thorough explanation as to why and how the error occurred. The state has a five-year, $25 million contract with the company that ends in 2014.

Patricia Ross, spokeswoman for Measured Progress, said the error occurred in the process of setting up the computer system to produce this year’s MCAS results. In creating the system for this year’s data, an old scaled-score conversion chart was stuck in as a placeholder until this year’s chart was received.

But because of a human error, the old chart was never swapped out with the new chart, Ross said.

“It would be arrogant to say mistakes don’t happen, but we hate to see errors happen,” Ross said, stressing the company has had a long and successful relationship with Massachusetts.

The correction of the error caused the state to reduce the number of schools and districts that did not meet proficiency targets the state set under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Now, 1,393 schools 350 districts missed their target, instead of 1,404, and 354 districts.

The Westwood High principal could not be reached for comment.

The last time the state had MCAS scaled scores corrected was in 2002, after a Whitman-Hansen Regional High School student found another way to answer a question correctly on the 10th grade math exam. That change resulted in additional 557 students in the Classes of 2003 and 2004 to pass the exam.