I heard this earlier today.

Problems:
1. The speaker used the preterite where the past participle was required.
2. One does not run test results.

Explanation:
I do not remember the complete sentence, but it was something along the lines of “The test results that were ran in [some system] were inaccurate.”

Regarding the first problem, similar mistakes include “were gave” and “were drove”.

The verb “run” has these basic forms:

• Run — present simple, as in “Can you run a marathon?”
• Ran — preterite, as in “My wife ran a half-marathon last Sunday.”
• Run — past participle, as in “They have run out of things to say.” or “They had run the engine for three minutes before it died.”
• Running — present continuous, as in “The engine is not running.”

The frequency of this mistake — using a preterite where a past participle is required — seems to be increasing.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “were run” — 2,320,000 matches
• “were ran” — 107,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “were run” versus the incorrect “were ran” by a ratio of 21.7-to-1, which is good but not great.

Replacing “were ran” with “were run” gives us “The test results that were run …”, which lets us focus on the second problem: one runs tests, not test results.

Solution:
“The tests that were run …”