This time last year, the Florida Department of Education was scrambling. Their new standardized test, the Florida Standards Assessment, had crashed. Some students trying to take the assessment were unable to complete the test, while others couldn’t log in to the system at all.
It was nothing short of an unpleasantly rocky rollout on the heels of an already controversial test but after resolving the kinks in the statewide testing operation, Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart vowed to improve the FSA.
This year, the department said, the testing would be as problem-free as possible.
2015 testing glitches seemed to be more prevalent in larger school districts, like Miami-Dade County and Hillsborough County, both of which canceled testing entirely until server issues were resolved.
At the time, Miami-Dade School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was one of the most vocal about the testing glitches, intensely criticizing the Department of Education for the technical issues, which affected some of the nearly 400,000 students in his school district.
"Improving the system alone is not sufficient for me, my teachers and students," said Carvalho. "Either they have it right or they don't."
The department blamed the first round of technical glitches on a cyber attack, but problems with the FSA continued into April of last year. The department said an unauthorized technical change caused the second wave of problems with the attack.
Other districts and schools didn’t see any problems, but it’s not totally certain whether the likelihood a district experienced issues was partially due to its size.
Chuck Ellsworth, a high school English teacher in Monroe County, said his high school didn’t have any issues implementing computer-based testing.
“We had enough computers that we could rotate the computers at the computer lab,” he explained of last year’s testing administration, but admitted at his high school, which has 750 students, kids are more familiar with how to use a computer since most of them have them at home.
“Because we don’t have so many people on the computer at once, we did not have issues with people getting kicked off [the server,]” he said.
But not everyone had the same experience as Ellsworth’s school. Outcry over the glitches raised many concerns that the FSA wasn’t valid and tensions ran high as lawmakers, parents and members of the public blamed the department for debuting a test too soon. Lawmakers soon passed a bill to mandate the state validate the assessment test and cracked down on what they saw as a massive overtesting problem.
The department was ordered to complete a validity test, which ultimately showed the test was valid.
The rollout this year has been fairly smooth so far, with the department working with the testing vendor American Institutes for Research to make sure confusing and unnecessary test steps were eliminated. The department got rid of several steps, like unauthorized progression which allowed students to skip ahead to the next sections of the FSA.
“This is not an exhaustive list of improvements, but we hope that it does serve as a reassurance that we take very seriously the concerns expressed last year and that we have remedied the issues that caused them,” state officials said.
Now that the first month of testing is over, glitches seem to have mostly been wiped out or minimized to an incredibly small amount of students.
Still, a sense of uneasiness over the FSA and testing in general looms over the administration. Some have said the FSA is part of a bigger overtesting problem in which students aren’t learning lessons or material but instead are learning to take tests.
Ellsworth agreed overtesting is a problem in Florida.
“Testing has certainly gone overboard,” he explained. “I understand the idea of accountability but it’s to the point now where they have end-of-course exams, they have FSA exams, they have PSAT tests...we spend more time testing adn preparing for the test sometimes than we do teaching.
The testing window for secondary and middle schools’ mathematics and English language FSA begins April 11 and continues to May 6.
