EchoVibe

Students at two Washington area private schools reported seeing a question from an Advanced Placement exam on the Internet the night before the test was given nationwide, prompting an investigation by testing officials and, possibly, retests for some students.

Administrators from Sidwell Friends School in the District and St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac said students notified them that a question had appeared on a Web site just before the AP U.S. history exam was administered May 11. Nearly 200,000 high school students nationwide took the three-hour test.

"Because students all over the nation took this test and because any student in America could have seen the question, the test was compromised nationally," said Ellis Turner, assistant head of school at Sidwell Friends.

Kevin Gonzalez, spokesman for the Educational Testing Service near Princeton, N.J., said the nonprofit company has been investigating rumors of a security breach for about a week. He said he did not know when the investigation would be complete.

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Gonzalez declined to say what part of the country investigators were focusing their attention on. But they are visiting schools where students reported seeing the question. St. Andrew's headmaster James Cantwell said investigators have already been to his campus.

Testing service officials said that at least one school in California administered the test early, Cantwell said.

Cantwell has asked that all 24 St. Andrew's students who took the exam be retested; ETS officials told him that would have to wait for the investigation to be completed, he said.

"It's just really tough on the kids," Cantwell said.

At Sidwell Friends, 65 students are waiting to hear the outcome of the investigation. And across the country, students are waiting for their test scores, which can translate into college credit.

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The test has two main parts, 90 minutes of multiple choice questions and 90 minutes of essay questions, with one large question based on a collection of documents on topics such as the civil rights movement. AP history teachers and students every year try to guess what this "document-based question" will cover.

It is that question that students say appeared on the Internet, Cantwell said.

Turner said he called the testing service after a student told the chairman of Sidwell's history department that he had seen the question posted on the Internet. Turner said he was not sure if any other students saw it before taking the exam.

At St. Andrew's, Cantwell sent a letter home to parents last week describing how the night before the exam, one of his AP U.S. History students found the question on a message board on the Web site for Princeton Review, a test preparation service.

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The student did not contact anyone on the message board, but did call some classmates to tell them about it, Cantwell said. On May 11, when students met for breakfast before the exam, they all discussed what "might or might not" be the essay question. The student and his classmates told their teacher soon after seeing the question on the test.

Representatives of Princeton Review said yesterday that after searching their Web site, they had not found any message containing the question.

Corey Podolsky, executive producer of the Web site, said the company reserves the right to pull down any copyrighted material posted by visitors. That would include a test question. But, he said, "no questions were posted on our Web site."

Yesterday, the message board was flooded with comments about the question and how it came to appear in cyberspace.

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Cantwell said he was bothered by the news that some students may have taken the test early.

"I'm deeply troubled," he said. "There are . . . schools that do not follow ETS guidelines. That's a big concern because it's not just the AP, it's any of these tests."

Lee Jones, executive director of the AP program, which is sponsored by the College Board, said he knows of no circumstance in which a school has ever been permitted, "or ever would be permitted," to give an AP exam before the scheduled date.

College Board sources also said it is highly unlikely that all scores on the history test would be invalidated because of such an incident.

The policy has been to invalidate only individual scores for which there is evidence of copying or other security breaches by the test-taker. There would have to be evidence that a student had gotten advance word of a question and acted on it for the score to be in jeopardy, sources said.

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