690 Advanced Placement Test Scores Tossed by the National Administrator

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MISSION VIEJO - Chanting "We want our scores!" as passing drivers blared their horns in support, about 150 Trabuco Hills High School students, parents and teachers rallied in front of the school Wednesday afternoon to protest the invalidation of their Advanced Placement exams by the test's national administrator.

The students demanded that the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service reinstate 690 college-level exams scrapped after the company learned of numerous testing irregularities that potentially compromised the test's administration.

"We did nothing wrong," said student Dan McClure, 18, chair of the Justice for 375 Trabuco Scholars student-led coalition. "We took our AP courses, we took our AP exams, and we took our tests just as we were instructed to do."

A total of 385 students who took AP exams in 10 subject areas in May were affected by ETS's decision, handed down earlier this month to the Mission Viejo high school.

AP officials were tipped off to the school's violations of testing procedures, including allowing cell phones in testing rooms and seating students facing one another, during an investigation by school administrators into alleged cheating on the AP exams. Ten students were found guilty of cheating.

In a harshly worded report, ETS said Trabuco Hills administrators had failed to follow "a number of established test administration procedures as clearly set out in the 2008 AP Coordinator's Manual."

The report, dated July 11, cites 10 major violations of ETS testing protocols, including not meeting the proctor-to-student ratio, allowing students to choose their own seats instead of randomly assigning them, not seating students according to spacing and seating requirements, unsupervised restroom breaks during testing, hiring "inattentive" proctors, and not enforcing the no-cell-phone policy, among other things.

"Your school district knew about cheating since May 18," state Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, told students at the rally. "For the past two months, they tried to take care of it without letting you, the students and the parents, know about it."

The students have been given the opportunity to retest Aug. 6-12, but many say their summer schedules are filled and they'll have a hard time attending the retesting dates – much less finding the time to brush up on the material.

Mrs. HolyCoast has proctored lots of these tests (plus SATs) at her high school (not Trabuco Hills) and as she heard them read off the violations on TV she kept saying "you can't do that, you can't do that either". The kids and their parents want to blame the testing service, but it appears the real problems are with the school proctors. They've really messed some of these kids up.