Last week, NC State admitted Bobby Washington and quickly added him to their football roster. Williams, out of Killian High in Miami, was one of the nation’s top running back prospects. Up to a week ago, Washington was headed to the University of Miami. After Miami questioned Washington’s qualifying ACT score, he angrily asked for his release. Miami granted his request and NC State quickly admitted him.
So, the obvious question is, what exactly happened here? Why would Miami deny admission to one of their star recruits at the last minute? Remember, this is a school that just a few days earlier accepted Willie Williams and his lengthy arrest record.
The story boils down to two standardized tests taken by Washington. In his first attempt, he took the SAT. He scored a 750, well below the standard for most colleges and the NCAA (unless you have a very high GPA, which is extremely unlikely if you score a 750). Now, apparently, Washington has been diagnosed as learning disabled, meaning he should have been able to take an untimed test, but he didn’t. Either he didn’t really qualify under the SAT’s standards or he didn’t ask. Either way, he took the test timed, just like everyone else, and scored a 750. His mom was fairly pleased with this, saying “for an L.D. student, I thought that was pretty good.”
Not good enough though.
So, Bobby and his mom looked into things and found out that he was eligible to take the ACT under different circumstance. He could take the ACT untimed and have a reader, who could read each question to Bobby up to ten times. Bobby took this test and scored a 24. A 24 on the ACT is roughly equivalent to an 1110 on the SAT. That means that he improved (on the SAT scale) by about 360 points. That is a HUGE improvement, regardless of testing circumstances.
If Bobby had taken the SAT twice and had such an improvement, his scores would have been flagged and checked by the ETS. They automatically flag any scores that improve by 350 or more points, as such improvements are extremely rare. In this case, no one flagged the difference, because he took two different tests given by two different companies. The SAT people had only one test to look at and so did the ACT folks.
The only people who could legitimately question the scores are the admissions offices of the schools Bobby applied to. I don’t know if Miami questioned his scores initially, but they did once someone called and reported that Bobby’s second test was not legitimate.
Going back to the jump in scores, take a look at this story about a regular student in Virginia who took the SAT twice and had a similar jump in scores. She went from an 850 to a 1230, a jump of 380 points, about the same as Bobby’s. The ETS immediately flagged her score, investigated it, and found her answers suspiciously like another student’s who was sitting just behind her. According to the article, of 13,000 students who scored an 850 and took the test again, only 8 got new scores of 1230. Eight out of thirteen thousand. That’s an extremely exceptional result. It becomes even more exceptional when you consider that, in Bobby Washington’s case, the student was one of the most sought-after football recruits in the country and there was tremendous pressure to produce a good score.
So what about this second test, with the reader? According to Bobby’s mother, the reader was a school counselor from his high school. A counselor might certainly have reason to want Washington to do well on his test. He was the star athlete in school, and surely everyone wanted him to do well. How hard would it be to influence the results of a test in a one-on-one setting with someone who was reading the questions out loud up to ten times? Couldn’t you lead the test taker just by altering the inflection of your voice? Or maybe by reading the question out loud again if the taker gave the wrong answer?
Don’t misunderstand, I have no inside information here. I have no idea if Bobby Washington cheated or not. I’m just looking at the situation and it looks very fishy to me. Sure, he could have been one of the extremely rare few who improved that much. Certainly, his chances of doing so were greatly enhanced by having an untimed test, even if the reader didn’t help him any.
Another possibility is that Bobby just blew off the first test. He is a stud athlete, and they often don’t think such things are important. Then, after getting a poor score and realizing that he wasn’t eligible, he really applied himself the second time. It’s possible.
But, I doubt it.
When you put all the pieces together – a star football player, taking two tests by two different companies to avoid comparison, taking the second one as LD when he didn’t the first time, having a school counselor as his reader, having a statistically unlikely improvement, a claim by someone that he cheated and then being rejected by the Miami admissions department despite certain pressure to accept him … well, it’s all very curious indeed.