Testing season starts, with hopes for glitch-free exams

Florida schools kick off their high-stakes testing season Monday, hoping computer-based exams run better than last year when software glitches and cyber attacks caused widespread disruptions.

The problems with the debut of the Florida Standards Assessments prompted fierce criticism, as students sometimes could not log into the testing system, got booted off midway through tests, accidentally moved ahead into test sessions or lost some of their work.

An inept help desk further exasperated school administrators trying to test thousands of students.

The Florida Department of Education said it has worked with its testing contractor during the past year to add safeguards and make improve-

ments. It feels confident the changes will help and is buoyed by successful online testing in the fall, mostly makeup exams for high school students who previously had failed state tests.

Central Florida school administrators said they’ve done what they can on their end to make sure their computers and their online connections are ready for FSA’s demands.

“We’re focusing on preparing everything that is in our control,” said Brandon McKelvey, associate superintendent for accountability for Orange County schools. “We feel comfortable that our hardware, our software, our wireless is more than appropriate.”

He added, “The rest is kind of up to the state.”

Students in grades four to 10 will begin taking the writing section of FSA on Monday, though testing schedules vary by school and district. Only teenagers in grades eight to 10, however, will take the writing section via the computerbased system that caused trouble last year. Younger students will be writing their essays on paper.

But more students will test online starting in April, when computer-based FSA reading and math exams are given to students in fourth grade through high school.

The department said “key remedies” made for 2016 with its contractor, American Institutes for Research, include upgraded cyber security and new features to allow students to restore their work and to prevent them from accidentally deleting answers or moving into another test session.

“We hope that it does serve as a reassurance that we take very seriously the concerns expressed last year, and that we have remedied the issues that caused them,” spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said in an email.

A spokesman for AIR referred questions to the education department but said the firm was working to “improve processes for this spring.”

Whether AIR, which has a $220 million, six-year contract with Florida, will be fined for last year’s problems remains a “pending legal matter,” Etters said.

Other states have had mishaps with online testing, too. The Tennessee Department of Education earlier this month canceled its computer-based exams, switching to paper-and-pencil tests after serious technical difficulties.

Florida’s problems in 2015 prompted some calls for FSA to be dumped in favor of national tests such as the ACT or SAT. They also led the Florida Legislature to pass a new testing law, one that demanded a “validity study” of the FSA before scores could be released.

The study, released in September, called the 2015 FSA administration “problematic … on just about every aspect of the computerbased test administrations.”

But it also concluded that, in the end, FSA testing was completed successfully and that the problems had a negligible impact on student performance.

Fall 2015 FSA testing did not involve nearly the number of students who will be doing online exams in the pending testing session. So McKelvey and others noted it is not necessarily an accurate gauge of what might happen in the weeks ahead.

About 80,000 students took computer-based exams from mid-September through mid-December. That many students, or far more, could test on a single day in the upcoming ses- sions, based on data from last spring.

School districts across Florida, including Orange and Seminole County’s, also reported some problems during FSA test runs earlier this month, noting a lag time between when a letter was typed on the computer’s keyboard and when it showed up on the screen. The education department said AIR is addressing those glitches.

Lake County schools did not experience problems during its Feb. 9 test, said Paula Wicker, the district’s manager of evaluation and planning.

But school districts ran their system tests on different days and at different times. The “million-dollar question,” Wicker said, is what will happen when thousands of students from across Florida all try to test at the same time?

Last year, the problems began almost immediately. Students in more than half of Florida’s school districts had trouble logging into the FSA system on its inaugural day in early March. A cyber attack disrupted testing several days later. And an unapproved software update by AIR created more havoc in April.

School administrators looking for assistance were “universally critical” of the FSA help desk run by AIR, the study said, complaining that it was staffed by employees who mostly read from a manual.

Seminole’s testing coordinator said her district is confident its online system is “good to go,” but it has taken a “wait and see” attitude on the state’s readiness.

If there are problems, “we know how to respond,” said Kelly Thompson. “We’ve had lots of practice.”