Glitch in testing

Statewide glitches in ISTEP+ online testing Monday didn’t mean disaster for students in Jay School Corporation.
“We had a few problems, but we made it through,” Wood Barwick, assistant superintendent of Jay School Corporation, said this morning.
An estimated 200 students were only able to get through seven to nine answers of the online program before getting an error signal and having to restart and log back in.
Fortunately, every principal had training to deal with errors in the system and were able to fix most errors within 10 minutes.
“It’s not a glitch that we’re concerned about because our goal was to get through the testing,” said Barwick.
Students in all six of the county’s elementary schools and both middle schools were affected. ISTEP testing is done statewide for students in grades 3 through 8.
Indiana Department of Education officials said 27,000 students statewide were affected, including school districts in Indianapolis, Carmel, West Lafayette and Brownsburg.
Some of these glitches led to tests taking twice as long as usual and pushed some school districts to rearrange testing schedules until the glitch is fixed by testing contractor, CTB McGraw-Hill LLC.
Barwick said that there are correction procedures and appeal procedures in place from the state if students think they received a wrong score.
“If we had any students that were visibly upset, we recorded that with the name of the student and the time, and we may get into some adjustments,” said Barwick.
Rather than delay the testing, ISTEP+ tests will continue today, and Barwick hopes the worst is over. “I hope it goes well today,” Barwick said this morning.[[In-content Ad]]