January 20, 2006 | Newsday

Sometimes, one has to wonder whether the New York State Department of Education is trying to discredit its own standardized-testing regime.

They just can't seem to get simple things right.

In the latest of a series of inexcusable screw-ups from state and city education officials, an answer sheet used for the seventh-grade English Language Arts test on Tuesday had the letters in a multiple-choice section scrambled.

The questions listed the answer options as A, B, C and D — yet the answer sheet gave students the options of F, G, H and J for five of the 26 questions.

So test administrators asked kids to transcribe: A means F, B means G, C means H and D means J.

Got that?

OK, it's not actually the toughest thing in the world. These are seventh-graders, and they should be able to adjust to a minor bump like this without too much difficulty.

And education officials are right not to throw out the entire test based on a blip — unless the review planned by the state Education Department reveals tremendous irregularities in the answer patterns on the affected part of the test.

But a blip is still a blip — and that's unacceptable on exams that are used not just to track students' academic progress but now to determine whether children advance from the seventh grade to the eighth.

Dumb mistakes like this one also give anti-testing extremists more firepower against a regime they already want to dismantle.

"The state has to come forward now and say this test is invalid and that they will not give another one," said Jane Hirschmann of the parents' group Time Out From Testing, pouncing on the bad news.

Randi Weingarten, head of the accountability-allergic teachers union, said this incident shows that the schools "need to stop this fixation on high-stakes testing."

Testing is vital, but it's harder and harder to hold the line against such sentiments when the test administrators can't get their act together.

City and state officials repeatedly mess up these exams. In 2004, kids got an advance look at questions on a city reading test. So the students then had to take a new exam — and that test had a botched answer sheet much like this week's. A similar fiasco affected the math tests.

Even when the exams have no obvious errors, it often seems that the difficulty of tests varies so much from year to year that it creates illusory gains and losses across the entire state.

Testing is too important to consign to such buffoonery. It's time for the city and state to get their acts together.