Students Prep For Saturday SAT

Expert Offers Last-Minute Tips

(CBS)  This weekend, high school juniors nationwide will take part in an annual right of passage — the all-important SATs.

The test weighs heavily on college admissions. Adding to students' anxiety is a series of disclosures in March that thousands of tests given last year were incorrectly scored, and in some cases the mistakes have had serious consequences.

Jake DeLillo, a senior and captain on the lacrosse team at Yorktown High School in Westchester, N.Y., had hoped to receive an athletic scholarship to a good college. He says he was interested in Sacred Heart, UMass, Rutgers and Brown.

DeLillo received letters of interest from dozens of schools, some of them Ivy League. Then he received his SAT scores and they weren't what his family had hoped for.

"The numbers were low, so they said 'Thank you, but no thank you,' " Jake's mother, Mary DeLillo, said.

The high school senior didn't even apply to some of the most competitive schools because of his low score.

What DeLillo didn't know was that his was one of more than 4,000 tests that had been scored incorrectly. In March, he learned his corrected score was 170 points higher.

"I felt a little angry and little upset, but there's pretty much not a lot I can do now," he said.

What made matters worse was that by the time the correction was made, most schools had already finished awarding the scholarships he had hoped to receive.

"It's not fair. It's unjust. He was deprived of his opportunity," Jake's father, Steve DeLillo, said.

Bruce Poch, the admission's director at Pomona College in California says, unfortunately, some students will just have to accept they won't be going to the school of their dreams.

"It hurts and I definitely feel the knot in the stomach that those kids must have," Poch said. "I think its immensely frustrating for some small group of students, but I don't know what fairly could be looked at right now without changing a whole lot of other decisions as well."

The DeLillos will never know what school their son might be attending if his test hadn't been mis-scored. Fortunately, he is going to college on an athletic scholarship.

"Jake is going to the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, Long Island, and I think it will be a good fit for him, he'll be happy there," Mary Ellen DeLillo said. "But always in the back of your mind you're going to say 'What if one of those other schools had gotten the correct scores? What doors would have opened?' "

What can students do to ensure that their SAT score is accurate?