Education Week - May 8, 2013 - 18

EDUCATION WEEK

MAY 8, 2013

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States’ Online Testing Disruptions
Prompt Common-Core Concerns
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Inc., in Kentucky; and the
American Institutes for Research,
in Minnesota.
Thousands of students experienced slow loading times of test
questions, students were closed out
of testing in mid-answer, and some
were unable to log in to the tests.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of tests
may be invalidated.
The difficulties prompted all four
states’ education departments to
extend testing windows, made some
state lawmakers and policymakers
reconsider the idea of online testing, and sent district officials into
a tailspin.
The testing problems were “absolutely horrible, in terms of kids
being anxious,” said Eric F. Hileman, the executive director of
information technology services
for the 43,000-student Oklahoma
City schools. Some high school
students were taking Oklahoma’s
high-stakes tests, which require
that students pass four out of seven
end-of-instruction tests to graduate.
“It was heartbreaking to watch
them,” Mr. Hileman said. “Some of
them were almost in tears.”
act

System Overload
The problems in Oklahoma and
Indiana began on April 29.
In Oklahoma—where roughly
300,000 students were using online
tests and about 3,000 experienced
problems—it was the end of the
testing window for grades 3-8 and
the middle of the testing window
for high school students, said Tricia
Pemberton, a spokeswoman for the
state department of education.
At 9 a.m., students’ testing sessions were disrupted by the glitches,
and some were unable to restart or
to proceed, she said. The problems
continued the following day, when
the system crashed at 10 a.m.
Indiana experienced similar problems on those days, and districts
were instructed later in the week
by the state education department
to reduce the number of tests being
given by half to proceed with the
state assessments.
Ms. Pemberton said the simple
explanation from Monterey, Calif.based ctb/McGraw-Hill was that
computer servers could not handle
the testing load.
In a statement, ctb/McGraw-Hill
officials said that earlier practice
simulations “did not fully anticipate
the patterns of live student testing,
and as a result, our system configuration experienced service interruptions that impacted the testing
process.”
Kentucky officials were forced
to suspend online end-of-course
exams last week after problems,
including slow or dropped connections, were reported in about 25
of the state’s school districts, said
department of education spokes-

woman Nancy Rodriguez. About 60
percent of Kentucky’s district’s deliver those state-mandated exams
online, while the rest use paperand-pencil assessments.
State officials issued a statement
saying that the test vendor, act
Inc., indicated the problem occurred
when its system became overloaded,
and that capacity for it had been
subsequently increased. Online testing was scheduled to resume early
this week, and state officials said
they would provide districts with
guidance on how to “maximize the
testing system’s capacity” to avoid
additional breakdowns.
In Minnesota, problems with
online testing began on April 16
and were experienced in multiple
districts across the state, affecting
up to 5,000 students, said Charlene
Briner, a spokeswoman for the state
education department.
A week later, on April 23, 48 districts reported disruptions in online testing, and the following day,
a handful of districts experienced
further problems, she said.
Jon Cohen, an executive vice president of the air, the Washingtonbased not-for-profit research and
assessment organization that provided the online tests in Minnesota,
said the tests are designed to allow
students to pause and log back in
later if they’re experiencing technical problems.
According to air data, he said,
about 3,000 students out of 15,000
being tested at the time had slower
load times of more than 30 seconds.
He said air servers were overloaded
not by the number of test-takers, but
by the large amount of diagnostic
data the organization was collecting.
About 95 percent of students in
Minnesota take the math portion
of the state tests online, but only
about 30 percent take the reading
portion online, Ms. Briner said. That
will change under the common-core
standards, which Minnesota has adopted for English/language arts but
not for math. All students will eventually have to take ela tests online.
Ms. Briner said that in light of
the recent online testing problems,
however, the state is evaluating
“whether or not a paper option is
better for accountability testing.”
“We believe in moving to a nextgeneration set of assessments,”
she said, “but we’re also believers
in making sure people have confidence in the accuracy of the information we report.”

On ‘Pause’
Others were also worried about
the future, particularly when it
comes to common-core testing.
Coincidentally, just before the testing problems arose in Indiana, the
state legislature passed and sent
to the governor a bill that would
“pause” common-core implementation there.
Glenda Ritz, Indiana’s superin-

tendent of public instruction, told
Education Week that the state
might pull out of the Partnership
for Assessment of Readiness for
College and Careers, or parcc, one
of two consortia developing common-core tests.
She called the testing problems
the state experienced last month
“unacceptable.”
Wendy Y. Robinson, the superintendent of the 30,900-student Fort
Wayne, Ind., community schools,
said she doesn’t know how students, parents, or educators can
now have confidence using online
testing for the common core.
“Teacher pay, school evaluations,
student grades … are all going to be
tied to a system that none of us have
any faith in anymore,” she said.
In Oklahoma, lawmakers such as
Rep. Curtis McDaniel, a Democrat,
called for a moratorium on online
testing. “If we can’t get this little
piece of the puzzle working in the
right direction, how are we going
to get it right for the whole state or
the country?” he said.
“Common core has some good
values,” he said, “but we need to reevaluate what we’re doing.”
But Chad Colby, a spokesman for
parcc, said despite the problems, the
advantages of computer-based testing remain, especially when it comes
to evaluating student knowledge, offering more interactive testing, and
maintaining test security.
He acknowledged, however, that
the tests must be reliable.
“The benefits of computerbased assessments for students
and teachers vastly outweigh the
growing pains and issues in a few
states,” he said. parcc will work to
solve any technical problems before
the common-core online tests are
rolled out, he added.

Anticipating Glitches
Joe Willhoft, the executive director of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the other group
developing common-core tests, said
a number of states in his consortium have already been using online testing with all their students
for years without major incidents.
He said he was confident any kinks
could be worked out before common-core tests were launched.
But educators around the country
remain concerned about their technical preparedness for commoncore online testing, said Keith R.
Krueger, the ceo of the Washingtonbased Consortium for School Networking, or cosn.
A survey that cosn released in
March found that preparing for the
online tests ranked second among
the top priorities for the group’s
members.
Though districts have primarily been worried about their own
infrastructure and testing capacity, now they are realizing that
even if they are well prepared,

ASSESSMENT DERAILMENTS
Several states have experienced major mishaps with their
statewide assessments recently, breakdowns that caused
delays and disruption for teachers and students.

some problems are out of their
control, Mr. Krueger said.
“I would think of this as the canary in the coal mine,” he said of
the recent testing problems. “These
things are not easy to pull off on a
statewide basis. We need to do it in
a careful way and plan for the unexpected.”
Mr. Cohen of the air, which is
working with Smarter Balanced
to deliver adaptive pilot tests that
adjust the difficulty of questions
based on how well a student is answering them, said his organization’s assessments are designed in
a way that allows for glitches and
gets students back on track when
they occur.
“The tests need to be designed
as online tests and not as paper
tests,” he said. “You recognize that
the technology is going to fail somewhere, sometime, and you build the
test to be robust.”
Douglas Levin, the executive
director of the State Educational
Technology Directors Association,
or setda, based in Glen Burnie,
Md., added that there can be risks
with paper tests, too, such as when
floods washed out warehouses of
tests in the past year, he said.
Even so, Mr. Levin—like Ms. Ritz
in Indiana—said the recent problems with online testing were unacceptable.
While there’s been an emphasis
on getting districts technologically
ready to administer online testing
for the common core, he said, “there
is a need for the assessment industry to ensure that it has the capacity to serve these larger numbers of
kids with a quality of service that
really has to be very high.”

‘Doubt and Uncertainty’
In the meantime, districts were
just trying to deal with the logistical and emotional fallout from the
online testing problems.
John Althardt, a spokesman for
the 30,000-student Indianapolis
public schools, said students in 50
buildings experienced testing disruptions, and the district was just
focusing on getting through the
testing cycle before thinking about
how to proceed in the future.
“Some of our folks would say
they’re ready to go back and use
stone tablets at this point,” Mr. Althardt said.
In Oklahoma, Superintendent
Keith Ballard of the 42,000-student
Tulsa public schools, said in a statement that the testing problems were
“nothing short of disastrous,” adding
that the district would be forced to
invalidate at least 460 tests.
Ms. Pemberton of the Oklahoma
education department said all students will have an opportunity to
retake the tests if they want to.
Those who scored enough to receive a proficient grade on the tests
do not need to retake them, even if
they did not finish.
But the logistics of extending the
testing window and retesting students are significant.
In the Oklahoma City system,

iStockphoto/Joachim Angeltun

INDIANA
April 29: More than 30,000 test sessions
were interrupted as students began
taking state exams. The state department
of education extended the testing window
by three days.
April 30: Test interruptions spiked to
8 percent, and the department suspended
testing for the rest of the day.
May 1: The education department
instructed districts to continue testing
students, but to reduce their daily testing
load by half.
May 2: The department extended the
testing window an additional two days,
for a total of five extra testing days.

MINNESOTA
April 16: Schools reported widespread
problems with online testing. Up to 5,000
students’ tests were disrupted.
April 17: Testing resumed.
April 23: Test interruptions resurfaced.
About 48 districts reported slow loading
times or other problems.
April 24: A handful of districts reported
persistent testing interruptions. About
60 students were affected. Minnesota
added one day to its testing cycle to allow
districts to catch up.

OKLAHOMA
April 29: Students were taking state tests
online when problems began at 9 a.m.
April 30: Testing began at 7 a.m.;
problems arose again around 10 a.m.
About 3,000 out of 300,000 students
experienced some test irregularities.
The state extended its testing window by
two days to allow districts to catch up.
SOURCES: State Departments of Education;
Education Week

for instance, one middle school had
bused its students to a local university because the school lacked
enough devices for students to take
the online tests.
Education observers will be
watching whether the spate of
problems helps prepare both districts and testing companies for the
online common-core tests.
Mr. Levin of setda said the testing problems will provide an additional argument for opponents of
the common core.
“There are people who, for all
sorts of reasons, are looking for ammunition to spread fear and doubt
and uncertainty about the implementation of common core overall,”
Mr. Levin said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up among the arrows in their quiver.”
Education Week Assistant Editors
Sean Cavanagh and Michele McNeil
contributed to this report.
Coverage of entrepreneurship and
innovation in education and school
design is supported in part by a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation of New
York. Education Week retains sole
editorial control over the content
of this coverage.

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Education Week - May 8, 2013

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