BOSTON (AP) – The nonprofit College Board, which owns the SAT college entrance exam, has demanded that its chief critic remove from its Web site data showing that minority and poor students scored lower than white and upper-class kids.

The letter to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, also called FairTest, claims the Cambridge-based nonprofit organization violated copyright law by posting the scores without permission.

“Unfortunately, your misuse overtly bypasses our ownership and significantly impacts the perceptions of students, parents, and educators regarding the services we provide,” stated the letter, signed by College Board legal affairs assistant director Tasheem Lomax-Plaxico.

FairTest, which opposes an overreliance on standardized tests, posted the Oct. 27 letter on its Web site along with its refusal to comply with the College Board’s demand. FairTest argues that the data is widely available in the public domain and therefore not subject to copyright protection.

FairTest spokesman Robert A. Schaeffer said the College Board is trying to suppress facts because it is unveiling a revamped SAT in the spring.

“They’re trying to eliminate criticism at a time when they’re trying to sell product,” Schaeffer said. “Every newspaper in the country prints charts similar to that. They’ve made no effort to crack down on newspapers and research journals.”

The College Board’s letter refers only to copyright issues and doesn’t mention the content of the posting in question.

Lomax-Plaxico and a College Board spokesman did not immediately return calls Saturday.

But spokeswoman Chiara Coletti told The New York Times there’s no effort to hide facts. She said FairTest’s use of the data may not be new -FairTest says it has publicized such data for 20 years – but it’s the first they heard of it.

“No one ever brought it to our attention before,” Coletti said. “But if it comes to our attention, we have to protect our copyright.”

Coletti said it was a mistake for the letter to also demand that FairTest stop posting similar data from the ACT, the nation’s second largest college entrance exam that belongs to a different nonprofit.

The ACT and SAT were designed to help predict a prospect’s likely success freshman year, along with grades and other factors.

Critics long have attacked the tests as unfair, chiefly because white students tend to do better than other groups. Many reasons are offered – family income and education, school quality, courses taken, access to tutors and test-prep courses.

The College Board next spring will administer a revamped SAT. The changes were prompted by colleges’ demands for more ways to evaluate applicants’ writing abilities.

The FairTest Web posting breaks down the SAT scores of 2004 college-bound seniors by gender, ethnicity and family income.

It showed that on average African-American students scored a combined 857 (math and verbal), Mexican-American and Puerto Rican students 909, other Latino students 929, white students 1,059, and Asian students 1,084.

The overall average score was 1,026.

Scores also rose steadily as family income rose. Students from families making $10,000 or less scored a combined 872 on average. Students from families making more than $100,000 scored on average a combined 1,115.

More than 1.4 million members of the class of 04 took the SAT, an all-time high. The 37 percent who were minorities was also a record.

On the Net:

The College Board: http://www.collegeboard.com

FairTest: http://www.fairtest.org/