The City University of New York for years has misrepresented SAT scores of its undergraduates, and CUNY officials say they have no record of the average test scores of its enrolled students.

CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein and CUNY’s chairman of the board of trustees, Benno Schmidt, have portrayed SAT scores of those who were accepted into CUNY’s senior colleges as those of students who enrolled.

In public statements, a speech by Mr. Schmidt, and the public institution’s five-year master plan, CUNY has repeatedly cited SAT score increases for incoming freshmen without specifying that the figures referred only to the pool of accepted applicants.

Asked for average scores of its enrolled students, a CUNY spokesman told The New York Sun that CUNY’s central administration does not keep such data.

“We have only the admitted numbers,” CUNY spokesman Michael Arena said.

Mr. Schmidt, a former president of Yale University, and Mr. Goldstein refused to comment and directed calls to CUNY’s public affairs office.

CUNY officials do not know for certain whether SAT scores among its enrolled students have increased in recent years, though the jump in scores of admitted applicants would suggest they have.

As many high school students apply to CUNY as a safety school, the gap in scores between the admitted pool and actual enrolled applicants could be wide.

More than half of students who are accepted into CUNY’s top-tier senior colleges – Baruch, Hunter, Queens, Brooklyn, and City – do not end up enrolling, according to data from Princeton Review’s Web site.

At New York University, a more selective school than CUNY colleges, the difference between the admitted SAT average and enrolled average of is 28 points: 1380 and 1352.

While Mr. Arena said CUNY has not purposefully misrepresented SAT numbers, that CUNY has continuously cited SAT figures of its admitted students came as a surprise to a number of current and former high-level CUNY leaders.

A former chairman of CUNY’s board of trustees and former congressman, Herman Badillo, said he did not know the figures reported by CUNY referred to only students who were admitted.

“I assumed it was students who were attending,” he said.

A professor of English at Kingsborough Community College who heads CUNY’s faculty senate governing board, Susan O’Malley, described CUNY’s reporting of SAT scores as “deceptive.”

“It should be students who are enrolled because that’s what gives us a sense of what’s going on,” she said. “We should have an accurate reading of what is happening.”

In recent years, CUNY has touted the SAT scores of its undergraduates as a prime example of how the institution has transformed since it put in place tougher admissions standards and ended remediation in the senior colleges.

CUNY officials have argued that rising SAT scores were proof that more rigorous academic standards were attracting a higher caliber student to CUNY campuses.

Reports of skyrocketing test scores not only have lifted CUNY’s reputation in the eyes of city leaders and the public, the scores have helped silence the reforms’ critics who predicted the new admissions policies would have a disastrous effect.

Mr. Arena said CUNY has consistently reported SAT averages of admitted students since they began collecting comprehensive SAT data in 1999 when admissions policies began requiring students to take the SATs. And he said many other schools across the country report scores of their accepted students.

“The transformation of the university reflected in these numbers is 100% accurate,” Mr. Arena said.

But CUNY has frequently left it un clear about which student test scores it is calculating.

In a December 16, 2003, speech titled, “CUNY: Pride of the City,” Mr. Schmidt spoke of the improving quality of incoming CUNY students. He said, “[T]he researchers at RAND and other research organizations that we used would indicate that SAT scores of incoming freshman have increased in CUNY’s senior colleges in the last five years by nearly 200 points,” according to a transcript of the speech.

Mr. Arena said Mr. Schmidt was referring to the SAT scores of accepted students. In fact, the actual increase for admitted students was much smaller – 89 points between 1996 and 2004 – according to data CUNY released this week.

SAT increases are also cited in CUNY’s master plan for 2004 to 2008, a document released earlier this year. “The average SAT score at CUNY’s top tier colleges increased by 57 points over the past five years, from an average of 1049 for first-time freshmen entering in fall 1998 to 1106 for the fall 2003 entering freshmen,” it stated. Again, those numbers referred to admitted students.

Mr. Arena said an earlier sentence in the same section of the report makes it clear that the cited SAT figures refer to admitted students. The sentence reads: “Over the past four years, the academic preparation of freshmen admitted to the University has improved steadily.”

CUNY has also misrepresented SAT figures in its official press releases dating back to at least 2001. Most recently, a release from October 2003 stated that “total SAT scores for incoming freshmen at The City University of New York’s top-tier senior colleges rose 168 points between 1995 and 2003 to a high point of 1111 this year, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein announced today.”

In a press release last week about SAT scores and enrollment, CUNY correctly identified the scores as representing admitted students.

When Mayor Giuliani’s task force investigating CUNY issued its groundbreaking report in 1999 that labeled CUNY an “institution adrift,” one main complaint of the task force – which Mr. Schmidt chaired – was the lack of objective information about the academic levels of incoming CUNY students.

A vocal proponent of the academic reforms, State University of New York trustee Candace DeRussy, said CUNY once again is failing to provide adequate information about its students.

“Prospective students and the public, which so generously funds our campuses, need and deserve…complete, updated, and campus-by-campus disclosure of average test scores for enrolled students,” she said.