Always check your work

I don't know any more than what's in the paper on the MCAS scoring error that's resulted in over 3000 ten graders having a higher proficiency catagory than were first issued, raised the scores of 55,000 students, and even changed the percentage of schools that reached AYP. I assume it will come up at Thursday's School Committee meeting, as Superintendent Boone's report this week is on MCAS results. I do want to call attention to this telling piece of the article:

The state learned of the issue Wednesday after the principal of Westwood High School and a student from Newton North High School separately contacted the department about the issue after comparing raw scores, scaled scores and performance scores.

The company to which the state pays millions of dollars a year got it wrong. The state department charged with overseeing the results didn't catch it. The only reason that we know that this error happened is because a principal in Westwood  and a high school (one assumes) JUNIOR did some math and called the department!
And so it was caught...this year.
Do we know that this has never happened before? That maybe some other year no one outside the system did the math? That perhaps some of the kids that failed and didn't graduate, some of the schools dinged as "underperforming," some of the labels put on people and systems were done so, not because the kids did the math wrong, but because the adults did?

We are forever being told that kids, teachers, principals, schools, systems are failing because of this test.
What if it's the test that's failing?