The next test is supposed to be everything its much-maligned predecessor was not.

The new Maryland School Assessment will provide a score for each individual student. The old Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, or MSPAP, gave only schoolwide scores and gave little hint as to how pupils matched up against their peers elsewhere.

Though still under development, the next generation of exams is expected to be administered in much less time than the MSPAP, scored more quickly and be easier to grade objectively.

"This new test will answer some of the needs people have been expressing for a while," said Patricia M. Richardson, superintendent of the St. Mary's County schools in Southern Maryland.

This week, state education officials released the last batch of scores for the MSPAP, scores questioned by many local educators for the second year in a row. The scores seemed so implausible that systems were encouraged by state officials not to put too much stock in them.

The state is already looking ahead to the MSA, which will be administered for the first time in March. Officials are investing long hours putting the finishing touches on tests that for the first time will look at not just how students think, but also at how well they have learned the state's curricula.

By the time the last MSPAP test booklet was graded, the test that once won national praise for its emphasis on higher-order thinking was becoming universally disliked.

Many teachers hated it. Parents dismissed it, despite interest in seeing how their schools rose or fell from year to year. Even state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick tried to cancel the last administration while the new test was being written to adhere to the recently passed No Child Left Behind Act, but federal officials vetoed that idea.

"What MSPAP wanted students to do is to be able to apply knowledge," said Assistant State Superintendent Ronald A. Peiffer. The "missing piece," he said, was testing actual knowledge of course content. "It sent a message to parents that we didn't care about those things," he said, "but we did.

"Schools will now get credit for the foundational things that they do as well as the application," Peiffer said.

In its last stand, MSPAP became something of an orphan, the test nobody loved.

Maryland officials expressed low confidence in the 2002 scores, in part, they said, because widespread knowledge that the test was being scrapped might have had a negative effect.

"Whenever everybody knows it's the last time, there's a lot of evidence to suggest the data isn't as valid as it might be," said Gary Heath, the state's chief of arts and sciences. "Folks just don't focus as much."

There was another explanation for what the officials called "volatility" in the latest scores. Since its inception a decade ago, MSPAP had been graded by Maryland teachers earning extra summer money and most were thoroughly familiar with the test. To save time in 2002, the North Carolina-based company contracted to manage the scoring used its own scorers, who were unfamiliar with the test.

The result was inexplicable spikes and dips in scoring. A Sun analysis found consistency only in eighth-grade reading. Third-grade reading scores were particularly volatile.

Each year before the scores are released, officials check to see how they match up with those of the year before. "We found that 2001 lined up nicely with 2000," Peiffer said. "But in 2002 many individual items were scored differently."

Officials almost withheld results of the last MSPAP, but they were in a bind.

The new No Child Left Behind Act requires that the results of 2002 testing be the baseline for a dozen years of testing in reading and math. And Maryland, under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education, is on a crash course to develop a new test by next spring that would yield individual student scores.

"We went over [MSPAP] in as many ways as we could and decided it wasn't technically wrong," said Heath. "So we decided to release the scores and ask the schools to use them as wisely as possible."

National testing experts said changing the circumstances or scorers of a test can affect results. "You'd have to suspect that knowing it was going to be the last administration, people would think, 'It doesn't really count,' and that this would undermine motivation, or at least the motivation of educators to motivate the kids to do well," said Steven Ferrara, an analyst for the American Institutes for Research who helped develop the MSPAP exams.

Wayne Martin, a senior adviser at the Council of Chief State School Officers and former testing chief in Colorado, agreed. "A lot of times attitude can affect scores like that," he said. "And that could be the case when the test is being given for the last time. With MSPAP, we'll probably never know."

When the first Maryland School Assessment is rolled out in March - just nine months from inception to test day - it will be given to students in grades three, five, eight and 10; fourth-, sixth- and seventh-graders will follow during the 2003-04 school year. Half of the time spent on the test will be answering multiple-choice questions; the rest will be longer written answers.

The test will include a version of the national standardized Stanford Achievement Test/10 to show Maryland parents how their children stack up against their peers elsewhere. It will also include questions written just for Maryland to match what is specifically to be taught here.

The MSA will test only reading and math in just 90 minutes a day over four days - compared to the nine grueling hours over five days required by the MSPAP in six separate subjects.

Results of the MSA will eventually be available before school is out for the year to allow teachers to plan instruction for the coming year. MSPAP results were not released until at least December, seven months after tested fifth-graders had moved on to middle school.

And scoring of the MSA will be more objective, with multiple-choice test questions being added to supplement the longer answers that were the cornerstone of the MSPAP.

Few people have actually seen what the eventual test will look like. Some are already concerned the test could turn out to be too easy. New federal laws propose sanctions for schools and systems that don't show progress.

Sun electronic news editor Mike Himowitz contributed to this article.