[SkeuomorphicBee]

Nothing unfair about it, the truth is everyone got that question wrong (because there was no right option available), so they didn't fault the test takers, instead just annulled that one and scored everyone based on the actual questions, it is as fair as it can be.

It does suck for the people who though they had that one right, it is distressing to be shown one score and then later find out that the real score is lower. That should have been avoided by having an official recourse window before publishing scores, so when problematic questions are annulled then people only see their actual final score (in my country a recourse window is standard for all public exams).

[huytersd]

If they annulled the question, why would the score drop? Shouldn’t the scores be renormalized around the new number of questions, the easiest way being to just give everyone the points for it?

[Vegenoid]

Imagine there are 10 questions, and you got 9/10 correct. You scored 90%.

One of the ones you got 'correct' is annulled - now, you got 8/9 correct. You scored 88%.

[jjk166]

Except in this case no one got a correct answer annulled because it was impossible to give a correct answer. At most people could have avoided the guessing penalty by not answering the question. Everyone's absolute score should have gone up, though since the SATs are normalized your score can go down if other people's scores go up more.

[Timwi]

> Except in this case no one got a correct answer annulled

Everyone who gave the answer 3 was initially scored as correct but then had it annulled and saw their overall scores drop.

[huytersd]

They should have given out a normalized score like 8.1/9 in this case.

30 points is a lot. I had a perfect score (1600/1600). Getting a 1570 would have been significantly different. This is probably worse at admission cutoff thresholds.

[chatmasta]

You would still have a perfect score after the question was annulled. It's just the difference between getting (for example) 33 out of 33 questions correct, or 34 out of 34 questions correct.

[huytersd]

Ha. Maybe I didn’t deserve that 1600.

[chatmasta]

Well what's interesting about it is that a perfect score would be unaffected, but anything less would be affected because wrong answers are now weighted more heavily than before.

Although I'm not sure how the SAT assigns the scores - I don't think it's as simple as a percentage correct (otherwise the score would simply be out of 100), and that there is some kind of normalization they do? Can't remember... and it might have been different then anyway.

[acchow]

Sadly there was no way to differentiate those who got that question “correct” from those who didn’t.