University admissions officers must reevaluate the applications of 154 high school students vying for spots in the class of 2010 after the national College Board miscalculated their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores and sent them to the university.

University officials have now received the correct scores and said the mistake will likely not change admissions decisions for the students or affect their access to scholarships and financial aid.

Officials of the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT and Advanced Placement tests, announced last week they botched scoring 4,000 of October’s SAT’s – including the 154 prospective university students – and yesterday announced they botched an additional 1,600 tests.

As of press time, Zina Evans, associate director of undergraduate admissions, said she did not know whether anymore students were affected by the additional 1,600 incorrect scores.

The prospective students’ scores were either raised or lowered by 10 to 80 points, Evans said. She said admissions officers will spend the next two weeks completely reassessing each of the students’ applications and could offer admission to rejected students or rescind officers for students with artificially inflated scores. However, she said, this is highly unlikely because SAT scores are such a small part of the admissions decision and the extent of error is relatively small.

“People are concerned that we make good decisions, which is why we go back and review them,” she said. “We don’t rely so heavily on the SAT that it would lead to that.”

A student’s SAT score is only one of more than 20 criteria admissions officials take into consideration when deciding whether to offer admission to a student, including high school GPA, extracurricular activities, leadership positions, civic involvement and the admissions essay, Evans said.

The inaccurate scores spanned the spectrum from the lowest to the highest of the more than 22,000 applications the university received for next fall. There appeared to be no other pattern among the affected students, Evan said.

College Board officials could not be contacted by press time, but Evans said the officials told her scanning machines used by one of the independent companies the College Board hires to score tests malfunctioned, resulting in the errors.

The miscalculations will not affect need-based financial aid. Admissions officers are still considering recipients for merit scholarships, so they will now be able to consider students’ correct scores before making decisions.

Some of the affected students had submitted their applications before the early Dec. 1 deadline and had been notified of their acceptance or rejection, but those who followed the Jan. 20 application deadline have not yet been notified of their status. The students will be notified of any changes in about two weeks.

The admissions office has never experienced anything similar before, Evans said, but the office has received few calls expressing concern from parents or students.

“Now they know we have our correct scores, so they don’t have to worry about it,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact reporter Kate Campbell at campbelldbk@gmail.com.