Alaska’s Department of Education & Early Development suspended the Alaska Measures of Progress test Thursday after numerous issues with the University of Kansas-based online student assessment testing.
Pegge Erkeneff with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District…
Erkeneff: “The first thing that happened was a fiber optic cable was cut, and that’s completely out of the control of the provider that’s doing all the assessment testing.”
That initial outage happened Tuesday morning but Erkeneff says there were intermittent outages all week from what the University’s Achievement & Assessment Institute is calling data overloads.
Erkeneff: “We did have students that were getting bumped off and we weren’t positive exactly what was happening and that happened a couple different times. The State of Alaska Department of Education and Early Development was also very frustrated so they made the decision to suspend the AMP test until they can work with the vendor to determine if there is a solution so that there’s no disruption to our classes, to our students, to our teachers and we’ll find out what’s going to happen with that in the next few days.
Alaska’s Department of Education Interim Commissioner Susan McCauley stated in a release, “The disruption to the learning environment of our students is unacceptable, we will not resume the assessments unless the vendor can guarantee that the testing system is fully functional.”
The Department did not reply to requests for comment on what assessment testing options there might be going forward.
