As if it isn't already hard enough to get a kindergartner to sit through a standardized test , 2,700 New York City public school students have been wrongly shut out of the city's gifted and talented program thanks to an entrance exam scoring screw-up this year.
Pearson, the testing company responsible for creating the exam, says they accidentally downgraded test percentiles, and scores of students entering kindergarten through third grade who made the qualifying 90th percentile or above were told otherwise. Luckily, a couple math-savvy parents caught the error and complained to to the Department of Education, though that wasn't so easy, either. "[A woman at the DOE] said, I can’t really explain it to you. It’s very involved," Rena Ismail, who caught a scoring error on her 5-year-old's test, told DNAinfo. "They kept telling me I was wrong but I knew I was right."
The DOE has since issued a statement criticizing the testing company. "Pearson has an established record in this field and we depend on its professionalism and deep capacity to deliver for the public," Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said. "But in this case, they let our children and families down. I have told the company’s officials in no uncertain terms that I expect this will never happen again." 2,678 students are now eligible for seats in super-competitive districtwide gifted programs, and 2,037 are eligible for seats in citywide programs, meaning they scored in the 97th percentile or higher.
They'll be extending the deadline for gifted and talented program applications into May; meanwhile, Pearson, who says they're "truly sorry for the error," will apparently have to give the DOE $80,000 of its several million dollar contract with the city to call angry parents over the weekend, so it seems like pretty much everybody loses with this one.
