Usually, students take exams and receive their scores soon after – but in New York City that’s not necessarily the case.

The city’s fourth- and eighth-graders sat for standardized statewide science exams seven months ago. The city sent the approximately 200,000 science test scores up to Albany four months ago. But the students who took the exams still have no idea how they did.

City Council Member Eva Moskowitz, chairwoman of the council’s Committee on Education and a proponent of emphasizing science education, wrote a letter late last fall to the commissioner of the state Education Department, Richard Mills, urging him to release the scores and explain the long delay.

On Friday, when The New York Sun asked one of Mr. Mills’s spokesmen, Tom Dunn, about the whereabouts of the scores, he pinned blame on the city’s Department of Education. He said that the state Education Department, although it is responsible for disseminating state-approved score reports for the fourth- and eighth-grade English and math tests to schools and students statewide, is not responsible for doing the same with the statewide science tests.

When the Sun called the city Department of Education, a spokeswoman said it is not responsible for getting the science test scores back to the children who took the tests.

That spokeswoman, Michele Mc-Manus Higgins, said state regulations do not require the city’s education department to send individual science reports to parents. She said the state does require that the scores be posted on the central computer system, which is accessible by principals and teachers. That posting, she said, was completed sometime last fall – about five months after the children took the exams and most had advanced to the next grade. Since the science scores are available through the central system, ATS, according to Ms. Higgins, principals and teachers are able to learn from them and help improve their science programs.

She acknowledged that parents find out how their children performed on the exams only if they go into the school office and request the information, but she said: “We are exploring various channels to provide this information directly to parents.”

One way would be to include the science test on the “Grow Reports” that parents receive from the city education department. The reports are created by the Grow Network, a division of CTB McGraw-Hill, which has a contract worth about $1.5 million with the city to create parent-friendly reports of individual scores.

Ms. Moskowitz said she’s not very sympathetic to the state agency or the city agency in this debate.

“Ultimately I don’t care whose responsibility it is,” she said. “I know it’s not the kids, and I know it’s not the teachers, and I know it’s not the principals. It’s got to be the educational bureaucracy.”

“You cannot ask kids to take a highstakes exam in the spring and not tell them how they did,” she said Friday. “It’s January 14, for God’s sake. When are parents and teachers and students going to know how they did?”

Ms. Moskowitz said that when she had a similar complaint about the dissemination of the statewide math test scores last year, she learned that responsibility for getting out the scores is divided.

“That’s a part of the problem,” she said. “Everybody points a finger. The city blames the state for taking so long. The state blames the city for not distributing them.”

Although the city says schools now have access to the testing data, a few principals contacted by the Sun said they were not sure if they had seen the science results. In her November letter to Mr. Mills, Ms. Moskowitz wrote: “Teachers could not look up the overall scores of their students until this month, and they are still unable to see a breakdown of how their students performed on each test question.”

That, she said, constitutes a serious problem.

“There’s a real reason why teachers must have the results back,” the council member said. “Tests are a way for teachers to understand how to change their didactic strategies. … Tests help teachers know where their students’ strengths and weaknesses are, with regard to content and critical-thinking skills.”

Ms. Moskowitz called the failure of education bureaucrats to release clear information about how children did on the science exam “hypocritical.”

“At Tweed, there’s all this talk about accountability of kids, of teachers,” she said. “What about accountability of the bureaucracy? If they can’t do the job, they should get out of the business.”

Ms. Moskowitz said the communication failure is “particularly galling” given the emphasis on high-stakes tests. Starting in the 2005-06 school year, the statewide science exam is to become one of the factors for which schools can be held accountable under No Child Left Behind.

A principal who is worried about a school’s being classified as a School in Need of Improvement under that law would want to have information about student performance available now to act upon it, she said. Indeed, she said: “I would have wanted to start planning two years ago or three years ago.”