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Technical Glitch in Testing System April 14

April 15, 2015

Technical glitch discovered in testing system Tuesday, April 14

On the second day of state elementary and middle school testing of science and social studies, testing was interrupted because of a technical glitch in a server used to run the state’s testing system.

Beginning at about 8:30 a.m., users of the test administration portal noted that their testing systems were running slower than normal and in some cases they couldn’t log on. School testing administrators also had problems adding students into the testing system and experienced a slower than normal processing time for students trying to resume testing.  They also had slower than normal screen refreshes.

At 9:40 a.m., schools and districts were asked by the state not to start additional testing at that time. Students who were already testing were able to continue testing. Students who had already started testing earlier in the morning were not impacted.  About 34,400 students continued their testing even as the technical glitch was being resolved.

At 12:10, districts were told that they could again start new test sessions and resume testing that had been paused.

Colorado’s testing contractor, Pearson, determined that the issue was caused by multiple hardware failures on a server that supports the system. Initially, the remaining server could not handle the additional load. It had to be reconfigured and rebooted in order for the system to get back up and running.

At no time was there any risk to student responses or the transmittal of data from Colorado to Pearson. In all, the state had 62,546 students who started testing today compared to about 47,000 students who started tests on Monday, April 12. Not all students complete a test in a day as many schools purposefully split up the sessions so students complete the test in shorter periods of time over multiple days.