THE S.A.T.'S WATCHDOG.(The Talk of the Town)(educational tests)

The Web site of the test-coaching company the Princeton Review includes a feature called the "Vocab Minute"--a brief original song whose lyrics are intended to help students memorize the kinds of polysyllabic vocabulary words that come up on standardized exams. The current song is called "Rainy Day S.A.T. Blues #4000." It concerns a test-taker named Billy, who almost doesn't get into the college of his choice (Princeton, of course) because "the company that runs the S.A.T., / it was a little nonchalant; / it let those tests get wet, / causing Billy to get / a score he didn't earn or want." (Nonchalant: feeling or appearing calm and relaxed.) The lyrics allude to the recent difficulties of the College Board, which in the past few weeks has had to notify more than a thousand colleges that forty-four hundred students who took the S.A.T. last October received scores that were too low, some of them by four hundred and fifty points. The problem, the board said, was excessive moisture in some of the answer sheets, which didn't register properly in the scanning equipment of Pearson Educational Measurement, the Iowa company to which the board subcontracts its S.A.T. grading.

The board's problems have also produced some hectic weeks for Robert Schaeffer, who is the public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, a nonprofit advocacy group. Schaeffer's telephone has been ringing constantly, with calls from reporters, college admissions officers, high-school guidance counsellors, and parents. He has also heard from more than a half-dozen law firms, several of which have been involved in other testing cases, including a successful suit against Pearson over scoring errors on a test administered to Minnesota high-school students.

FairTest was founded in 1985, when a friend of Schaeffer's who had been involved in battles over standardized testing "kidnapped" him, as he put it, and persuaded him to help with a project that ultimately became FairTest. Schaeffer had become interested in testing while working in M.I.T.'s now defunct Education Research Center. FairTest's current headquarters are in a rented house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose owner is a retired high-school guidance counsellor. "Our landlord, like almost all guidance counsellors, hates the S.A.T.," Schaeffer said.

In recent years, FairTest has suffered serious financial difficulties. Its budget--currently around two hundred thousand dollars a year--is heavily dependent on grants from foundations, which have been less generous than in the past. "We used to have as many as six ...