Anthrax scare slows arrival of national high school tests

TRENTON, N.J. -- The anthrax scare has held up the PSAT answer sheets of about 75,000 students nationwide, but officials with the College Board said the delay won't affect students' chances at a scholarship.

The answer sheets have been quarantined along with anthrax-tainted mail, the College Board said Friday.

The sheets come from about 1,200 of the 23,000 U.S. high schools where juniors and sophomores took the preliminary SAT, which serves as a qualifier for National Merit Scholarship competition.

"We certainly are willing to try to make whatever accommodations we need to so all the students can participate," said Elaine Detweiler, spokeswoman for National Merit Scholarship Corp.

Most of the missing answer sheets are believed to be among 800,000 pieces of mail detained at the mail processing center in Hamilton N.J., after officials found anthrax-contaminated letters had passed through there.

Mail from another postal facility, Washington D.C.'s shuttered Brentwood facility, where two workers died from inhaled anthrax, ran into a different problem this week -- two batches caught fire during the decontamination process, apparently because some material overheated.

Postal Service officials declined to specify what materials might have overheated, saying they didn't want to give information to potential saboteurs.