Measured Progress, a not-for-profit organization responsible for creating standard based assessments, open up about their latest challenges with the online assessment delivery platform provided by Smarter Balanced and developed by a Smarter Balanced vendor.

Measured Progress is known for connecting the K-12 educational community with innovative and flexible assessment solutions. Their major goal according to the most recent release is to accurately test the students learning period making it easier for teachers to pinpoint the areas that need extra attention.

Martin Borg, president and CEO of Measured Progress, gave a statement on the Smarter Balanced platforms that have run in to a few challenges, however, Borg says that Measured Progress is working on fixing the bugs and accessing woes upon the platforms launch.

“Measured Progress has a long history of successfully deploying online assessment,” said Borg in a statement for Measured Progress. 

“Assessing this many students online at once throughout the country on an open-source platform is new and unprecedented, and there were bound to be some initial challenges.”

Borg says over the last few months Measured Progress performed exhaustive quality assurance testing based on codes delivered by Smarter Balanced vendor. The problem lied within testing how the program would perform during a peak time of traffic.

“We apologize for the frustration and inconvenience that students and educators experienced as a result, and we remain committed to the goal of helping our clients provide a successful online testing experience for their students,” Borg continued.

The company has made numerous improvements to the platform in recent weeks including modifications to the server structure and the deployment of the updated system based on the code they received from the Smarter Balanced vendor.

The information has lead to continued successful assessment completion in Montana and North Dakota this week.

“Students who logged in were not disrupted, and no saved data or responses were lost,” said Borg.

“Building on that success, we are working with officials from Nevada to implement a plan that further reduces the processing load on the database servers. We expect this to result in improvements to the student assessment experience. We will continue to collaborate with Smarter Balanced and its vendor to optimize the performance of the assessment delivery platform.”

Measured Progress shows that initial implementations of technology still need work once they are launched. These assessment programs are responsible for tracking student learning which even for tech systems, can be a difficult task.

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Article by Navindra Persaud, Education World Contributor