On the second Monday of a two-week range-finding session, the project manager of a test-scoring company convenes the meeting in a large conference room. The participants are esteemed experts in writing and education from around the United States who have been invited to this leafy campus to share their expertise, but the project manager has to make an announcement they may not like. "I have some bad news," she says.
"It seems we haven't been scoring correctly."
The room buzzes, with both a disappointment that such an assembly of experts might have erred and disbelief that anyone would doubt them.
"Says who?" a bespectacled fellow asks.
"Well," the project manager says, "our numbers don't match up with what the psychometricians predicted."