Glitch Forces OK Superintendent To Suspend Online Testing

Monday, April 21st 2014, 11:37 am

By: News 9

State Superintendent Janet Barresi suspends online testing across Oklahoma Monday afternoon after a technical issue disrupted testing for thousands of Oklahoma students.

According to the Oklahoma Department of Education, thousands of assessment tests were disrupted by some sort of outage. Testing vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill is looking into the cause of the issue with its Oklahoma Online Test Delivery Client (TDC).

"It is an understatement to say that I am frustrated with McGraw-Hill," said Barresi. "It's an understatement to say I'm outraged!"

During a news conference Monday afternoon Barresi said the problems with the program included slow loading time, the program stopping and some students even getting kicked off the system.

"This state was ready," Barresi said. "Districts did every single thing we asked them to do. This appears to be 100% a failing of CTB and they have admitted that."

CTB/McGraw-Hill says the outage only affected online testing for grades 6-8 and end-of-instruction assessments for high school students. While the outage is affecting students statewide, it is not affecting all sites. McGraw-Hill reported 8,100 disruptions statewide, while 11,000 students were able to complete their tests.

Barresi says the company has assured them that students who had disrupted tests will have their previous answers saved so they can finish the test at a later date.

The Education Department is considering all options, though, including switching to pencil and paper testing. Meanwhile, the president of the company is coming to Oklahoma while technology engineers continue working to isolate and resolve the problem.

Here is a list of the tests affected on Monday.

Last year, school districts across the state dealt with a glitch during online testing through the CTB/McGraw-Hill testing system, invalidating hundreds of assessments. However, officials say this year's issue is not related to last year's problem.

4/30/2013 Related Story: OK Schools Forced To Change Testing Schedules Due To Server Crash

6/25/2013 Related Story: OEA Calls For Standardized Testing Results To Be Invalidated

1/28/2014 Related Story: Oklahoma Middle, High School Students Test Testing Computers