EVANSVILLE— Officials with the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. and the Metropolitan School District of Mount Vernon advised school buildings in their districts to suspend the second portion of ISTEP testing, which was scheduled to start today, due to a statewide issue with the online testing system.
Students in grades 3-8 in public and many nonpublic schools across the state are scheduled to take the multiple choice section of the assessment online from April 29-May 8.
These students took the applied skills, open-ended, portion of ISTEP March 4-13. ISTEP’s purpose is to measure student achievement in English/Language Arts and math. Students in grades 4 and 6 are also tested in science, while students in grades 5 and 7 are evaluated in social studies.
Required by the state, each child will complete the multiple choice portion of ISTEP online this year.
Marrs Elementary School Principal Greg DeWeese said he is having flashbacks of two years ago when a similar situation occurred. DeWeese said when his third graders went into the computer lab this morning, error messages continued to pop up on computer screens and students were not able to answer questions.
"I would venture to say anybody that was trying to test today got this," he said. "The only option that window gives you is to exit test. So we waited, and waited, and waited, and finally we said 'Hey, let's all exit the test' because the test supposedly saves your answers every tenth of a second ... So we assume that everything we answered so far is there and we can resume the test at some other time when they get these teschnology issues cleared up, not knowing if that was going to be in five minutes, an hour or a day. And we gave the kids a short break ... of course we're losing the kids at this point."
According to EVSC spokeswoman Marsha Jackson, the only students completing a paper-and-pencil format for the multiple choice section are those whose Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) requires that accommodation, or for a handful of students who may be in a building where Internet access is not available.
Jackson said some EVSC classes were able to complete testing today, but most could not. She said Susan McDowell Riley, EVSC deputy superintendent, is working through the state to resolve any scheduling issues that may occur.
"CTB, the company that does the testing, is onsite in Indianapolis at the Indiana Department of Education, but have not yet been able to rectify the problems that are occurring," she said. "Anything that has been answered will be in CTB’s database, so students will just resume where they left off tomorrow."
A message to the Indiana Department of Education has not yet been returned.