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PASADENA — The state Department of Education has determined that adults apparently altered students’ standardized test results in two third-grade classes at an elementary school here to improve the scores. 

An analysis of tests administered at Willard Elementary School last spring showed an unusually high number of answers that had been erased and changed from wrong to right, school officials said Wednesday. 

Interim Superintendent Edgar Seal said the Pasadena Unified School District has conducted its own review and will not contest the findings. 

“Our teachers didn’t admit it, but the irregularities showed it was something we can’t contest,” Seal said. In both classes, about 90 percent of the erased answers were changed from wrong to right, officials said. 

The state uses the Stanford 9, a multiple-choice test, to calculate the Academic Performance Index scores that evaluate schools from year to year. Schools that post significant gains are eligible for financial rewards, including bonuses to teachers. 

Willard had been eligible for the highest-level reward, which would have given each school employee between $5,000 and $25,000. The findings will mean that Willard is not eligible for those incentives, Seal said. 

The school, which has 780 students, will not get the incentives next year either, because it will have no base from which to compare any improvement. 

“It does hurt our pride,” said Willard Principal Kathy Onoye, who investigated the allegations. “We believe we’re a very good school. This is a real hard blow.” 

The California Department of Education has invalidated scores at 26 schools and is still investigating about 30 others for testing irregularities, said Pat McCabe, an administrator in the office of policy and evaluation. There are more than 7,000 schools statewide. 

McCabe said that in each case, a district has been determined to have had “adult testing irregularities,” either erased and corrected answers or inappropriate test preparations by teachers. 

Seal said both teachers who administered the exams denied altering the results. 

He said the district is exploring possible disciplinary action against the teachers, whose names were not release. One teacher continues to teach at Willard; the other left the district late last year. 

School officials said they do not believe that the principal or her administrators played any part in the irregularities, which were discovered after the publisher of the Stanford 9 test, Harcourt Brace and Co., spotted them last fall and notified the state.