The rollout of Florida’s standardized tests was so hampered by glitches that students “shut down” after having their answers lost over and over again, and others may have accidentally gotten a peek at questions a day before they had to answer them.
A recently released survey of Florida school districts that use the controversial Florida Standards Assessments has provided a more detailed look into what it was like as districts tried to administer the computer-based tests in the spring.
In anonymous responses gathered as part of a testing postmortem ordered by the Legislature, district officials outlined issues with the computerized exams that ranged from the annoying to the alarming. One district said some students may have been clued in that they hadn’t supplied enough correct answers when the test refused to let them move on until they added another response. Another district worried there might be lawsuits from parents. And yet another resorted to capital letters and exclamation points to register the full extent of problems that cropped up:
“With SO many error messages and issues, frustration and stress levels were through the roof!”
