Friday, April 17, 2015 | 3 p.m.
Nevada’s standardized testing woes could be over.
State Superintendent Dale Erquiaga said in a statement today that testing would likely be back to normal on Monday after nearly three days of technical problems with the testing company, Measured Progress.
The problems began Tuesday morning with students unable to login to the company’s servers to take the computerized test, called the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC). According to state education officials, the problem was the result of a coding error that has since been identified and fixed by Measured Progress.
Erquiaga ordered limited testing on Thursday and Friday to give the company time to figure out what went wrong. The same problems affected students in Montana and North Dakota.
As of Friday, the NDOE said that testing was going smoothly for around 10,800 students statewide.
“Based on the assurances from our vendor and the results of today’s stress tests, I am comfortable that online testing can resume in Nevada next week as planned,” Erquiaga said in a statement.
This is the first year that the SBAC has officially been used in Nevada and other states. It’s designed to test students in 3rd through 8th grades on Common Core reading and math standards.
In a statement released yesterday, Erquiaga said that he and the department were exploring “legal remedies” against Measured Progress. Standardized testing is mandated by federal law, and states who fail to sufficiently administer tests could risk losing funding.
A spokeswoman from the NDOE said Erquiaga wasn’t taking legal action off the table for now, but said the department is currently focused on getting the test up and running again across the state.
To make sure Nevada complies with the state’s standardized testing requirement, Erquiaga declared an official “irregularity” with the testing this year.
The move, which is spelled out under state law, would allow districts that encountered problems with the test to count their progress so far as sufficient in complying with the test mandate. It doesn’t mean that the state or its school districts did anything wrong, according to the spokeswoman.
The declaration doesn’t exempt the state from federal testing requirements, however. The state could still be on the hook for that, but department officials said they are confident they have done everything by the books.
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