Colleges scramble amid SAT glitch

College admissions officers in Massachusetts and elsewhere yesterday scrambled to deal with the applications of thousands of students whose SAT scores were too low because of a technical glitch, one of the biggest mistakes ever made on the high-stakes exam.

Many universities, including the most selective schools, do not finalize admissions decisions until the end of the month, but are well along in the process. Officials at some schools, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said they had already mailed out some acceptances and rejections. They will reexamine the applications of students who were affected by the College Board's mistake to see if the outcome would have been different.

Another worry, high school counselors say, is that students might have given up on applying to certain highly competitive schools because of the faulty scores, and now they have missed the deadline to apply.

Officials at The College Board, which administers the test, said technical glitches led to errors in roughly 4,000 students' October 2005 tests, resulting in some students not getting credit for some of their correct answers. The company, which is still investigating what happened, relies on computers at a facility in Austin, Texas, to scan students' answers from test sheets. The errors were reported yesterday in The New York Times.

The College Board has told UMass-Amherst that roughly 220 high school students who indicated to the company that they planned to apply to UMass received lower scores than they should have.

The timing could hardly have been worse, said Kevin Kelly, the director of admissions at UMass. The university, which is in the middle of mailing 12,000 decisions to applicants this week, will revisit the applications of some students. Kelly was not sure how many of the 220 students followed through on applying to UMass.

''Unless you spend a lot of time in a high school, you can't appreciate how crazed students can get about this stuff," Kelly said. ''To learn very, very late in the game that there might be an error is just going to exacerbate that."

Nationally, less than 1 percent of last October's test-takers received incorrect scores. The College Board began notifying college admissions officers of the problem on Monday and e-mailed affected students yesterday. Students in New England are likely to be disproportionately affected because the SAT is most popular on the East and West coasts, a College Board official said. The ACT test is used more commonly in some parts of the country.

The College Board said that 83 percent of the incorrect scores were too low by 40 points or less. Five percent involved 100 points or more, and 16 students' scores were more than 200 points off on the 2,400-point exam.

The errors occurred in all three sections of the test, which was significantly revamped last year to include a writing portion. The SAT used to be a 1600-point, two-part test. A few students received higher scores than they should have, but the College Board will let the higher scores stand, company officials said. College admissions officials stressed that the SAT is only one factor used in admissions -- and not the most important one.

Among UMass applicants, the affected scores ranged widely from a small number of points lower than they should have been to 170 points, Kelly said. In the more extreme cases, students may have been rejected for admission or denied scholarships, he said. Or, students could have been turned away from the most selective programs, such as the honors college, and the business, nursing, and engineering schools. Still, many students could have taken the test twice and received a higher score on the test that was properly graded, so it's hard to know how many were adversely affected by the glitch, Kelly said.

Some Boston-area high school counselors criticized the College Board for waiting three months after being alerted to the scoring mistake to notify those affected.

Some students had complained in December that their scores on the October exam seemed too low, and the company's subsequent checks uncovered errors, said Chiara Coletti, the College Board's vice president for public affairs. But it took months to check all of the tests, she said.

Coletti said she is not aware of such a large-scale problem with SAT scoring in the past, although occasionally an individual test has errors because a student shaded the answer bubbles too lightly or failed to fully erase an answer.

Officials at several area universities sought to calm worried students yesterday, saying they already have received the corrected information and will make sure no applicant is adversely affected. The number of applications affected ranged from 11 at Simmons College to more than 200 at Boston College. At Harvard, officials estimated that as many as 50 applications were affected.

Suffolk University has already alerted about half of its applicants on whether they've been accepted, but will quickly review the applications of those it rejected to see whether any decisions need to be changed, said John Hamel, director of undergraduate admissions.

If so, ''I'll be on the phone to them no later than tomorrow morning," Hamel said yesterday. ''We will make sure the decision was a fair one."

At Brandeis University, four students notified early through a special program were affected. Of the four, one was denied a place, one was wait-listed, and the other two were admitted. The correct scores will not affect the status of the two students who were not accepted, said dean of admissions Gil J. Villanueva.

High school counselors said they're concerned about how students might have reacted to their October scores when they were applying to colleges.

''If you're one of those 4,000 kids, it's a big deal," said Brad MacGowan, a college counselor at Newton North High School and past president of the New England Association for College Admission Counseling. ''You think you're going in with the best information possible and to find out months down the road you're going with incorrect data, that's disconcerting."

Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com. Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.