Technology issues caused a delay in ISTEP+ testing for any school in Indiana Monday that tried starting testing, including local corporations. According to a letter from Tippecanoe Valley Schools Superintendent Brett Boggs to parents, statewide ISTEP+ online testing for students in third through eighth grade was slated to begin Monday morning. “During the weeks leading up to today’s testing, the TVSC technology staff and building level test administrators at Akron Elementary School, Mentone Elementary School and Tippecanoe Valley Middle School worked hard to ensure our computers were ready for the administration of the online test. Unfortunately, today’s online testing was interrupted due to technological issues at the state level,” he wrote. CTB McGraw Hill Education, the organization that works with the Indiana Department of Education to release test content and test administration software, reported “red flag” status around 11 a.m. Monday, indicating there were significant, statewide issues with the test clients and CTB servers. Prior to the “red flag” status, Boggs wrote, the Tippecanoe Valley School District, along with many others across the state, was already experiencing problems during test sessions. “After receiving word of the statewide problems and experiencing the resulting issues within our district, testing was suspended. ... We have been assured that if a student’s test is in the interrupted status, the student’s responses are stored on the CTB’s servers and will be visible when the student logs back into the test session,” Boggs indicated. He concluded, “We apologize for the interruption to student ISTEP+ online testing and trust CTB will resolve the issues in a timely manner.” Warsaw Community School Corp. Chief Accountability Officer Amy Sivley said because of the fog delay Monday, many Warsaw schools decided to delay testing. “It really was a blessing in disguise,” she said. Two schools tried to begin ISTEP testing, she said, but the technology issue put a stop to it. Warsaw Schools will try to begin testing today. Sivley said they’ve been told by the Indiana Department of Education and CTB that testing would be ready to go as of 7:30 this morning. Reports from other schools around the state indicate there’s been no problem so far this morning. “This is the first year that all grades are testing online,” Sivley said. Last year, she said only the higher grades in each building tested online. That would have included fifth and sixth grade at the elementary schools, and seventh and eighth grade at the middle schools. David Hoffert, WCS chief accountability officer, said, “Every year there are problems with ISTEP,” including students being kicked off the system. The DOE previously said there wouldn’t be any more problems, so this issue affected everyone, he said. “Hopefully,” Sivley stated, “everything has been cleaned up.” The state has added three days to the ISTEP+ testing window, she continued, so hopefully the testing can be completed and run smooth from here on out. Wawasee Director of Curriculum and Instruction Joy Goshert said, “We were affected. We tried to do some testing in the morning at all of our schools and we had some issues.” Screens froze up and students couldn’t move from one thing to another in the test. Once Wawasee received a message from the IDOE that there was a problem at its end, she said Wawasee stopped testing, but tried again Monday afternoon. Problems continued so testing was ended. “We are back to testing this morning,” she said at 8:45 a.m. today. Since students had only been testing for about 15 minutes at that time, she wasn’t ready to say whether the problems had been totally fixed or not. “We are keeping a very close eye on it. If the issues continue, we still stop testing for the day,” she said. Goshert said at 6 a.m. today, DOE reported CTB worked through the night to fix the problem. “The DOE has tried to get this going,” she indicated. According to a memorandum from Dr. Michele Walker, IDOE director of the Office of Student Assessment, to schools this morning, “There is a high degree of confidence that the actions CTB has taken overnight have addressed the server problems that occurred on Monday.” The memorandum states ISTEP+ online testing may resume at 7:30 a.m. today. The testing window is now April 29 through May 15, but the paper-and-pencil test window will remain unchanged from April 29 to May 8. If there are questions regarding the validity of a student’s test, the memorandum states the “CTB and IDOE will review all data for all students that experienced interruptions to online testing on April 29, 2013, and local school corporations will be contacted if further information is needed. As always, for specific student situations, schools should document concerns and issues that occur during testing and contact the IDOE for guidance.” As for the cause of the online testing interruption, the memorandum states that between 8 and 9 a.m., CTB’s monitoring showed an issue with the ISTEP+ online servers that caused them to stop accepting network traffic for a brief period of time. “The current investigation points to an issue with a memory configuration on the ISTEP+ servers at CTB that caused the application to start swapping pages to disc instead of using physical memory,” it states. To rectify the situation, the memorandum stated all servers were restarted, memory was added and a test was taken overnight to verify that the changes took effect and are helping. The situation will continue to be monitored.
