Attack impedes Niagara EQAO literacy tests
Niagara’s largest school board is hoping students who wrote a scuttled provincial online literacy test will have completed exams marked.
The Ontario agency tasked with administering the first online literacy test to high school students last week says it was forced to pull the plug by an “intentional, malicious and sustained” cyberattack.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) says the network hosting the “voluntary” online test was targeted by an “extremely large volume of traffic from a vast set of IP addresses around the globe.”
It says the impact of the distributed denial of service attack carried out by “an unknown entity or entities” was to block legitimate users such as school boards and students from accessing the test.
Most of the province’s 900 high schools had signed up to participate in the test, a technical trial run before the first official one scheduled next year.
The EQAO, which oversees standardized testing in the province, says it’s confident student assessments can successfully be administered online.
District School Board of Niagara spokesman Brett Sweeney said the board had 3,191 students take the online pilot test last week. Of that number, 2,020 completed the entire test.
“The DSBN spent a great deal of time preparing for the online pilot,” Sweeney said, adding the board’s network functioned properly throughout the pilot and we experienced no issues at our end.
“While the EQAO will make a determination on how it will proceed, the DSBN recognizes how much work both students and staff put forward to prepare for the test. We’re hopeful that students who completed the test will have it marked, and that those successful will have fulfilled that requirement for graduation,” Sweeney said in an e-mail.
“The board also believes that students who couldn’t complete the test because of the issues the EQAO servers experienced should have their tests count as an attempt.
He said students who attempted the test would then be eligible to take a literacy course, in lieu of passing the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT).
The EQAO says an investigation is underway and will lead to recommendations to prevent similar problems in the future, The Canadian Press reports.
Its director of assessment said Monday the agency shares the frustration felt by students, parents and educators.
“We were shocked to learn that someone would deliberately interfere with the administration of the online (test),” Richard Jones said in a statement.
“There will be discussions over the next few weeks to determine how to strengthen the system, and we will continue to work with Ontario’s education community to understand how best to use online assessments to benefit our province’s students.”
The test was also meant to serve as a “risk-free” way for students to take it ahead of the next scheduled assessment in March 2017.
If students passed the online test, it would count, but if they failed or didn’t complete it, they would be considered “first-time eligible” for the test next spring.
Jennifer Pelligrini issued a statement Monday on behalf of the Niagara Catholic board, which had about 1,700 eligible Grade 10 students prepared to write the trial online Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test last Thursday.
“The online trial test was started at all Catholic secondary schools (that) morning, but cancelled by EQAO at 11:30 a.m., due to technical issues,” the statement said.
Niagara Catholic notified families using its website and social media Thursday.
Parents and guardians of Grade 10 students received a message by phone call or email on Friday, among other notification measures. The statement says due to the test cancellation, eligible Grade 10 students will continue to prepare for the regularly scheduled administration, both by paper and online, of the March literacy test.