Thousands of graders sat in front of computer screens, scoring the scanned answer sheets one by one.
The quality-control supervisor was running random spot checks on the scanned images from the back end.
He stopped. His brow creased.
In the endless river of crisp black-and-white answer sheets, one image looked wrong.
The multiple-choice bubbles were filled in with standard No. 2 pencil, dark and clean. The machine had read them without issue.
But below that, in the written-response and essay sections, the scanned image dissolved into vast stretches of barely-there gray smudges. In places, it was nothing but blank white.
Pink ink under a black-and-white scanner was virtually invisible.
"What is this?"
The supervisor zoomed in. He could just barely make out that there was writing underneath.
He didn't hesitate. He hit the violation key.
Even if the text had been legible, SAT regulations were explicit: any written response completed in a non-approved ink color was automatically invalid.
He marked it zero without a second thought.
He assumed it was an isolated case and was about to move on.
Then another sheet with blank written sections flashed through the data stream.
Then a third. A fourth.