Incorrect SAT Scores Reported for Aliso Niguel

School officials admitted Thursday that they reported incorrect 1995 SAT scores for Aliso Niguel High School--figures that initially appeared to give the school the highest combined results in the county--after a school official discovered that he had made an error in reading test reports.

Calling the error an “honest mistake,” Jacqueline Price, spokeswoman for the Capistrano Unified School District, said Thursday that Aliso Niguel posted an average score of 543 on the math portion of the Scholastic Assessment Test--not the 670 figure originally released.

Likewise, the average verbal SAT score among the 144 students who took the test was 467, 13 points lower than the 480 first reported by the school district.

“There was no malice intended,” Price said.

A score of 670 ranks in the 93rd percentile of all students nationwide who took the exam, said Fred Moreno, director of public affairs for the College Board, which sponsors the test.

Patrick Levens, director of the district’s secondary instructional support services, said he misread the official College Board report on the school’s average SAT score by looking in the wrong column. Instead of reading the figures posted in the 1995 column, he mistakenly read the scores in the 1994 column, he said.

Because the 2-year-old school had no seniors last year, Levens said he assumed there would be no SAT scores reported for 1994, and so did not check the year under which the figures were posted.

Officials are not certain what the figures in the 1994 reflect, but believe they may be the scores of a single student who took the SAT last year, Price said.

“He was not looking at column headers,” Price said. “He was just looking for the first score, which he assumed was from 1995. Instead, it was a score from what we think was a single student from the preceding year, in 1994. It was an honest mistake.”

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Levens added: “I’m solely responsible for the error. Everyone else was unknowingly acting on that misinformation.”

Price said officials will telephone the College Board today to determine what the inflated score represents and will release information clarifying how the error occurred.

The district’s overall score of 460 in the verbal portion of the test and 539 in the math was reported correctly, Levens said, because those numbers were tabulated by the College Board on a separate report.

Based on data available, University High School in Irvine registered the county’s highest combined score, 1,092, the highest math score, 606, and the highest verbal score, 486.

Barbara Smith, deputy superintendent for Capistrano Unified, noted that despite the error, Aliso Niguel still registered an average combined SAT score of 1,010 overall--fifth highest in the county.

“The fact remains that the school has done extremely well, and we’re still quite proud of our students,” Smith said.

The $50-million school, which opened in September, 1993, has been touted as the most high-tech public high school on the West Coast. It features a Macintosh computer in every classroom, high-tech graphics calculators for every math student and a fiber-optic video information network.

Officials attributed students’ high scores to that equipment, to excellent teachers and to a high level of parental involvement in the school.

Two other school districts reported their scores for the first time Thursday. Brea Olinda Unified School District, where officials said they had not received scores in time to release them along with the other schools, posted a 21-point jump in SAT math scores in the past year.

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Students registered an average of 544 in 1995, up from 523 in 1994. The district’s average verbal score this year increased three points, to 431.

Orange Unified School District, which declined to release scores along with the other schools, also reported an increase in both math and verbal scores. The districtwide average math score jumped 19 points, to 533, in 1995. The average verbal score rose nine points, to 447.

The district had declined to release the figures earlier, citing its interpretation of a news embargo issued by the College Board.