Educators and parents in at least three states have shared frustrations in recent days with glitches and connectivity issues as they have tried to access the widely used MAP Growth assessment from NWEA.
A spokesperson for NWEA told Education Week on Wednesday that the issues first cropped up last week and have been affecting students and teachers only intermittently, even within a single district.
鈥淭he majority of our school partners have been able to successfully complete their testing sessions,鈥� said Simona Beattie from NWEA. 鈥淩egarding the issue, it鈥檚 sporadic in nature, making it difficult to nail down and address.鈥�
A quick Twitter search reveals educators in Illinois, South Carolina, and Texas who have posted about negative experiences with the MAP test. 鈥淚鈥檝e been giving the MAP test for nearly 20 years, and it鈥檚 never been this frustrating,鈥� wrote . called the test a 鈥済iant fail.鈥�
NWEA鈥檚 Twitter account has been responding to the frustrated users and urging them to check the company website for status . The company shared on Tuesday that it had tapped a third-party vendor to diagnose the outages.
The online gauges K-12 students鈥� progress in math, reading, language usage, and science. Approximately 10,000 schools and education agencies use the tool, Beattie said.
Some schools have chosen to delay the scheduled date for administering the assessment in order to give more time for the technical problem to be resolved, Beattie said.
As it is, the problem is sometimes resolved when users refresh their browser or join a make-up test later, according to Beattie. The company hasn鈥檛 found evidence that the glitches stem from a higher-than-usual number of students accessing the tests from home computers, she said.
Still, the NWEA problem adds yet another technology challenge for hundreds of districts in full- or part-time remote learning mode. Cyberattacks have temporarily shut down school servers in several districts; students and teachers have reported as the new school year begins; and many students still at home to even access remote learning opportunities.
Image: Tony Berastegui, 12, left, and his sister Giselle, 9, do their schoolwork at home on the dining room table last spring after schools moved to remote learning. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)