Teacher and blogger Mary Holden writes about her experience with TNReady this year as she reflects on a survey sent by the Comptroller.
Here’s some of what she has to say:
Let me see if I can sum up this year’s TNReady experience:
- Some students couldn’t log on at all because their login information was incorrect.
- Some students couldn’t log on at all because their laptops were offline and we had to find the IT person to help. Or get another laptop and hope it worked.
- Some students logged on, started their tests, and then got booted off the testing site in the middle of testing. Then they had trouble logging back on.
- Some students logged back in after being booted off the site and their progress hadn’t been saved so they had to start all over again.
- Some students completed their whole test, clicked on the “Submit test” button, and then got booted off the site. Then they couldn’t log back on. Then maybe, hours later, when they were called back, they logged back on the site and then, hopefully, their progress had been saved and they were finally able to submit their test.
- Some students needed an extra password – a proctor password – to log back in, so we had to find the person who had that.
Through all this frustration and stress with the online testing platform and connectivity issues, students were told to do their best because this test was going to count for 20 percent of their class grade. They were stressed. They were angry. They felt they were being jerked around by the state of Tennessee. And they weren’t wrong. In the middle of the testing window, we learned that scores would not count. And they still had to continue testing! It was unreal.
And that is only what I personally experienced as a test proctor.
Statewide, we had even more ridiculous things happening – the testing platform was hacked (a “deliberate attack” was made on the site)(ummmm…. should we be more worried about this?), the testing site was down, a dump truck may or may not have been involved in a severed cable line – a line that just happened to be responsible for the testing site (for real?), and some students took the wrong test – and I could go on and on and on.
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