Wyoming sues Pearson and goes back to paper tests

Pearson's online testing, three times each school year, is coming to MCPS as part of Pearson/MCPS Curriculum 2.0.  Are MCPS parents paying attention?


The Hechinger Report: Online testing debacle in Wyoming provides a warning to other states

Technical problems erupted as soon as Wyoming switched to online testing in 2010. Students were unable to submit their tests after spending hours taking them. At times the questions wouldn’t load on the screen. And ultimately the scores were deemed unreliable... 

...Online testing was such a debacle that voters threw the state superintendent of education out of office and the state sued Pearson, the company hired to administer the test. (The state reached a $5 million settlement with Pearson, but the outgoing governor decided not to sign it and obligate his successor to the deal.) The state went back to old-fashioned paper, which it still uses...

 ...Instead, the network infrastructure collapsed under the weight of more than 80,000 public school students. Knopp explained that there were two cyber traffic jams. The first was that every school was routed through a single pipe to the Wyoming Department of Education. The Department of Education and Pearson had decided to control the raw test data through a single, private network...