Do Over

So you flunk that test to get into med school. Can you just say "do over"?

You can if you're a public school system....

More than three-quarters of Maine's eighth-graders performed below standard on the state writing test for 2007-08, prompting education officials to toss the results and try to figure out why so many students missed the mark.

State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron and her staff say the one-question test was somehow flawed because 78 percent of the estimated 14,900 eighth-graders who took the exam failed to write a persuasive essay as required.

That's a 50 percent increase, over 2006-07 in the number of eighth-graders who failed to meet or only partially met state writing standards.

In a rare move, Maine's Department of Education found the test results inconclusive, and withheld them from school districts and the media when it released the latest Maine Educational Assessment scores in July.

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