As if the College Board did not have its hands full dealing with the embarrassing disclosure last week of 4,000 erroneous scores on the SAT, today’s New York Times reports that the powerful testing organization had failed to check 1,600 additional tests for scoring errors.

The disclosure means that colleges, which are at the height of the admissions season and which are in the process of reviewing their acceptance and rejection decisions in light of the snafu, are not out of the woods yet. They may still have to review hundreds more applications, depending on what the College Board finds when it examines those 1,600 tests.

The tests had been set aside for special attention. The College Board refused to say why, the Times reported, but it could be because the scores reflected inordinate improvement over a previous SAT taken by the same student, suggesting that the student had cheated.

The 1,600 tests were being reviewed by the Educational Testing Service, which no longer handles the bulk of the SAT scoring for the College Board (The Chronicle, March 9). That work is now performed by Pearson Educational Measurement, an outside contractor that last week blamed the 4,000 erroneous scores on “abnormally high moisture content” in some answer sheets. The dampness, a result of rainwater encountered in shipment to Pearson’s scanning warehouse in Texas, was said to have corrupted the answer sheets (The Chronicle, March 13).