An analysis of what went wrong with this June’s SAT.

Forbes reports.

Either the College Board Is Lying, Or the SAT Is Too Long

A printing error on the June SAT gave some students an extra five minutes on the test. But, since some proctors caught the error, other students didn’t receive the extra time.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that test-takers were working on different sections when this timing mishap occurred. (To discourage cheating, the SAT presents test sections in different orders so that students are not all working on the same problems at the same time.)

The end result is that two sections — a 20-minute reading section with 19 questions, and a 20-minute math section with 16 questions — were compromised by this error.

The College Board has spent a week trying to come up with an appropriate response. On Monday, it announced that “after a comprehensive review and statistical analysis,” it would not score the two affected sections. The organization assured students and colleges, however, that it could still “provide reliable scores for all students” who took the June 6 test.

This response suggests only two possible conclusions: Either the College Board is exaggerating the scoring accuracy now, or it has been administering a test that’s about 30 percent too long for a decade.