N.Y. Student Wins Court Fight Over SAT Score

In a rare victory against the Educational Testing Service, a teen-ager accused of cheating the second time he took his Scholastic Aptitude Test won a court fight Monday when a judge ordered that his improved scores from that test be given to colleges.

State Supreme Court Justice William Friedman ruled that ETS had treated Brian Dalton, 18, as though he were “guilty until proven guilty.”

Dalton’s lawyer, Vincent Nicolosi, said it was the first time ETS had lost a court battle over the validity of a student’s score. ETS spokesman Ray Nicosia said the testing service had lost two similar cases but won both on appeal.

ETS said it will appeal Monday’s decision.

Dalton scored 620 on his SATs in May, 1991, while he was a junior at Holy Cross High School.

His test score was lower than it should have been because he had mononucleosis, said Jim Reynolds, executive director of The Princeton Review, a coaching service that Dalton used during preparations for retaking the test.

In November, after the six-week, $695 preparatory course, Dalton rang up a 1,030 score--such a huge improvement that the ETS computer spit it out.

Dalton was offered several alternatives: a retest, refund, arbitration--or sending both scores to colleges with a note saying ETS thought he cheated.

He and his parents sued ETS, based in Lawrence Township, N.J.

An SAT proctor, test supervisor and two other students who took the November test all said Dalton was present. The number of tests turned in matched the number of students. Dalton accurately described the test room.

However, “Mr. Dalton’s fingerprints do not appear a single time on the 40 pages of the test booklet from the disputed SAT,” ETS attorney Stanford von Mayrhauser said Monday.

He said handwriting experts found that the first and second tests were not taken by the same person, and that the signature on the second SAT did not match Dalton’s signature.

But the judge likened an ETS handwriting expert to a “clerical employee, not unlike a secretary.”