Students Get More Stress, New Test for the Holidays

Blame the printer

Attention potential magnet school students: You know that test you studied really hard for and took on Saturday? The one with missing or out-of-order pages? You have to take it again.

Sure, not every one of the more than 3,000 students registered to take the admissions test for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County received a defective test.

Those that did were sent to the cafeteria to wait while other students in the building finished the multiple-choice test until it was time to write the essays, reports the Washington Post.

Then, to add a little salt to the students' wounds, Fairfax officials weighed in. 

"We decided it's only fair that everyone retake the test," Paul Regnier, spokesman for Fairfax County Public Schools, told the Post.

Pour on the stress. And let the sniping begin...

"My daughter was so set and so psyched to take the test Saturday and get it behind her and now we're in limbo," one parent wrote on the Yahoo Groups listserv for the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted.

Blame the printer. That's what Pearson, the London-based testing company that develops, supplies and scores the tests, did.

In a statement released Tuesday, Pearson representatives apologized for the "inconvenience this printing issue has caused" and said a third-party printing contractor put together some of the booklets the wrong way.

Fairfax officials said they are now hoping to make Jan. 23 the new test date for the two-hour verbal and math reasoning test, the first hoop in a multi-step application process for the school that some rankings list as the best in the country.

As for the thousands that do re-take the test, only about 480 will be admitted to TJ next year. 

It's a tough world, kids. Merry Christmas!  

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