The company in charge of state testing acknowledged Wednesday that it underestimated the number of exams and materials needed to administer the accountability program, resulting in missing or flawed test booklets for nearly 10 percent of the state's 1,100 school districts, including Hawthorne, Lawndale and Los Angeles Unified.

Educational Testing Service (ETS), in its first year of overseeing the testing system, did not print enough exams for the 4.7 million California schoolchildren who take the standardized tests each year. Schools are rewarded or sanctioned based on the results.

"It is our first year doing the program, and we're learning as we go along," said ETS spokesman Kevin Gonzalez from the company's Princeton, N.J., headquarters. "We're amending our procedures so it does not happen ever again."

ETS vowed to hand-deliver missing exam booklets and materials to the Hawthorne School District this morning — still within the district's testing time frame but late enough to upset the pristine testing conditions demanded by such a high-stakes exam, officials there said.

On Wednesday, its first scheduled day of testing, Hawthorne was still without hundreds of seventh-grade tests, eighth-grade algebra exams and the 4,000 rulers needed for math tests. Every year, students take the California Standards Test and the CAT-6, a state curriculum-based exam replacing the Stanford 9 for the first time this year.

At worst, Hawthorne may need to squeeze the lengthy test into fewer days, exhausting students and jeopardizing the district's steady gains over the last few years. At best, some students will be taking exams while others are not, making it difficult to have a quiet, consistent testing environment, Superintendent Don Carrington said.

"It just clouds the validity of the results, because we haven't had the optimal conditions we believe these kids and these teachers deserve," he said. "We spend all year getting ready for these two weeks, and to do it in less time is unfair."

Other South Bay districts have discovered similar problems.

The Lennox School District received its practice materials three days late, giving children less time to prepare. The Los Angeles Unified School District received its materials Wednesday, just a few days before testing is slated to begin next week. And the Lawndale School District realized Wednesday that some of its fifth-grade tests contained blank or duplicated pages.

By law, the test publisher must deliver exam materials to all school districts at least 10 days before testing begins.

In 1999, then-test manager Harcourt Educational Measurement failed to deliver exam materials to 200 school districts in time to meet the testing schedule. Harcourt also miscalculated some scores, prompting the state Board of Education to assess a $1.1 million fine.

Phil Spears, director of the state's standards and assessment division, said ETS has worked to correct the problems, in some cases hand-delivering packages or sending them overnight.

"From my point of view, our contractor has tried to jump on those situations with both feet and work with those districts," he said.

Spears said districts cannot extend their testing schedules, but they can petition the state school board for more time. Each school district has its own 21-day testing window that begins once it has covered 85 percent of the curriculum.

"In these circumstances, if a condition has occurred beyond the district's control, such as not receiving test materials, it puts them in a pretty good position to argue for an extension of the testing window," Spears said.

"By the same token," he added, "I hope school districts will still make a sincere effort, in spite of the shortcoming, to see if they can do the best they can under less than perfect conditions."Carrington doesn't see why his students should have anything less than other districts across the state. Hawthorne schools will be judged on their test scores regardless of the delays, mix-ups and poor testing conditions, and that could hold grave consequences in such a high-stakes accountability system.

As for ETS' assurances that it is working on the problem, Carrington said: "For me, it doesn't cut it."