As the new vendor of testing for Texas, ETS is off to a rocky start. It lost all the grades 3-8 test scores for Eanes, Texas. Think of all the weeks wasted on test prep: for nothing!
“The state’s new testing vendor reportedly lost all tests taken by elementary and middle school students in central Texas district of Eanes, according to a report from The Texas Tribune.
“The site reports that Educational Testing Services told officials at that district that it lost tests taken by students in third through eighth grade, potentially impacting up to 4,000 students.
“This is yet another problem in an ever-growing list of concerns for New Jersey-based ETS in its first year of administering the STAAR test. Problems have ranged from the tests missing a correct answer to scoring problems to security concerns.
“The problems started getting reported in March with computer glitches that gave students the wrong version of tests, locked up or even erased answers. About 14,220 students across the state were impacted.
“In the Burkburnett school district, for example, some students had to rewrite their essays as many as three times after the system repeatedly kicked them back to earlier questions in the test English I end-of-course test.
“One student, after redoing her essay several times, finally typed ‘whatever’ in her essay out of frustration,” superintendent Tylor Chaplin wrote in a letter to the Texas Education Agency in April as he expressed his growing frustration.”
If a teacher or a school did this, they would be in deep trouble.
Mistakes were made!
Who will be held accountable?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
who will be accountable….they will blame the teachers, of course
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ETS is denying they have lost the tests. It released a statement saying they would have the scores by the June 15th deadline. Eanes, by the way, is the name of a School District in the southwest part of Travis County just outside of Austin. It is not the name of a town. I am a proud graduate. I had to pass the TEA MS test when this madness started. Thanks Ross Perot! (Sarcasm)
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Is ETS part of Pearson yet?qo
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The story is evolving, according to the Dallas Morning News: “‘Scores for students in the Eanes School District are not lost and will be reported, as scheduled,’ ETS said in a statement first published by the Tribune’.”
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The real question is why are these tests coming in AFTER school has let out? With 8000 students total in this district, these tests are not from the second round. What good is this information? What good are the 8th grade scores when the teachers won’t be seeing this students again? Madness!
Standardized tests delenda est!
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They must immediately notify the parents that all third through eighth grade students and the school district must be retained. I am being sarcastic of course.
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Hi â just FYI, the story is gone from the newspaper site.
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No surprise! This country is sick with the GREED of the oligarchy.
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Object lesson.
Best that could happen. Learning for learning’s sake: sharpening and broadening the mind.
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Lost scores?
No problem. They can just make up new ones.
ETS is good at making stuff up.
They’ve been doing it for decades.
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The essay thing happened to my son when he was in 5th grade. He tends to have anxiety, and this thing kept him up at night worrying for days. So, he does the essay. Several days later, without informing parents, the school made him and several other classmates redo the entire essay because the program deleted their essays. That’s when we started opting our kids out of the testing, and we’ve never regretted it.
OPT OUT!
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There is simply no excuse for a program “losing” your essay.
This tells you the kind of programmers testing companies are using. They probably don’t want to pay good software engineers, so they hire hacks — essentially coding monkeys who don’t know anything about developing and testing software.
The same thing happened with the Obama-care website. It was obviously written by hacks who had no clue what they were doing. They barely even tested it before it went “live”.
Anyone who knows the first thing about software development knows that you have to thoroughly test software before it is ever released to (on) the public. And actually, that’s just common sense.
Of course, for people like Bill Gates, “loosing” poorly designed, poorly tested software on the public is just standard operating procedure. has been from day one at Microsoft. Their automated bug submission process is a tacit admission of that.
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Not one superintendent has the b***s to STOP THIS MADNESS?
Would physicians, attorneys, nurses, or any other profession continue THIS MADNESSES?
I remember when Ebola first hit and patients entered the US, suddenly some American nurses were blamed for ‘not following safety procedures’ — well, all hell broke out because nurses fought back, on camera, in the news. They did not allow CDC, physicians or the media blame them. They stopped their MADNESSES and stood up!
Everyone was surprised at their reaction.
They did not take it.
Teachers and nurses have similar experiences of being mistreated.
Children and teachers should not have to jump through endless hoops. Our children are entitled to an education – endless testing is not an education.
Superintendents across America, STOP THIS MADNESS & speak up!
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We just keep doing the GAGA routine hoping someone will speak up for us. I still say that we should use the same approach as Nancy Reagan said “Just say No!”
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“Superintendents across America, STOP THIS MADNESS & speak up!”
Expecting adminimal supes to do anything is well, let’s just say, an exercise in insanity. We’ve seen a few “speak up” and say absolutely nothing concrete, much less actually do something to stop the madness.
NOPE, the adminimals definitely fall under Upton Sinclair’s observation “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Not only don’t they understand but even far less probable is them doing something about the educational malpractices they institute and mandate others to do.
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Oops!!!
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Because of this, the test no longer has any bark or bite.
Students, parents and teachers see ETS and the whole testing regime as a joke after this fiasco.
The reformers will continue to flog it, of course, but there’s no going back. The tests have been unmasked.
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“Who will be held accountable?”
Whoever thought, online testing will work.
But we can go further: if tests are made and administered and graded by the kids’ teacher, there is no possibility for such global disasters.
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I think they can make it “work” (as in , make it so it does not eat people’s essays and lose their sores), but, of course, that does not mean it can do what testing companies and VAMbots claim it (or even it’s nonline brother) can do: “measure student learning”.
It’s probably a mistake to focus on what are essentially cosmetic problems with online testing because they will eventually be fixed.
But the fundamental problem will remain: it won’t — and can’t — do what is claimed.
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It’s certainly is true what you are saying. On the other hand, the problem with computer testing is also fundamentally problematic: there are no programs without glitches (bugs), while a testing software cannot have any glitches whatsoever. The hardware situation is even worse: both the computers and the network used for the tests can and will have glitches.
The testing software would require extensive testing, the source code would require extensive public scrutiny to have the likelihood of bugs under an acceptable level. This cannot happen, can it?
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Breaking: AIR Loses All Exams for the State of Florida; Officials Walk Into Ocean in Support of Common Core
Update: Revealed as Hoax; Subversive Ad Gimmick for Upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean Movie
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“In the Burkburnett school district, for example, some students had to rewrite their essays as many as three times after the system repeatedly kicked them back to earlier questions in the test English I end-of-course test.”
Student-centered!
We all but told these companies they could ship garbage and we’d be more than happy to force children to find the flaws.
Consider it product testing with unpaid, mandated workers who just happen to be 3rd graders
Innovation! We’ll buy whatever garbage they churn out because who cares? It’s not like we’re paying these 9 year olds. It’s risk-free.
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You’re right, Chiara
This is the time honored way of “testing” software.
‘Loose” it on your customers and then collect the bug reports.
Microsoft actually made this their business model.
The fact that it was “eating” people’s essays tells you they never really properly tested the software because any decent testing would have uncovered that bug (though they would prolly call it a “feature” : gives students practice writing!).
I worked as a software tester for about a year for a small very good software development company before I became a developer and we put the software through the wringer before it ever left the door.
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“The fact that it was “eating” people’s essays tells you they never really properly tested the software because any decent testing would have uncovered that bug”
True. This is not a regular software but a onetime software: it is used only once. And is used by millions at the same time. Which software has only one in a million chance of having a bug? And we shouldn’t forget the possible problem swith the computer the kids are using and the network which transmits the test and kids’ responses. And then the hardware which records the kids responses and stores it.
Do we know of any place where such a high reliability demand on a computer environment has been met?
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In addition they don’t pay educators to proctor the test. The educators don’t work for the testing companies. In my state, they advertise on crags list for test scorers and pay a little over minimum wage. It appears they recycle questions because they do not want to release the questions. They must be saving $ on test preparers too.
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BINGO
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“Consider it product testing with unpaid, mandated workers who just happen to be 3rd graders”
Microsoft has been doing this kind of beta testing of Windows for decades.
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I am wondering if the testing software system of ETS or Pearson are of the same quality as SAT’s. As Manuel Alfaro writes
The system enforced structured review sequences; stored detailed item histories; stored all relevant item metadata; kept detailed logs of internal and external review outcomes; and we could, at the tap of a key, generate detailed reports for state clients…
Wait, I’m no longer at CB. I don’t have to make things up. The content management system consisted of folders and subfolders on the servers; for each item, staff would move a Word document from one folder to the next, like we did in the 1990s; update item metadata on an Excel doc; and, …
Any Pearson, ETS whistle blowers out there?
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Alfaro’s note is part of his report on SAT best practices as reported by Peter and Mercedes. Here is the link to the quote above
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/technology-college-board-manuel-alfaro?trk=pulse_spock-articles
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This is organizational madness and some one high up I the chain of command should be liable for doing this to students. No Child Left Behind how about several- unacceptable.
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