STAAR Testing Glitch Affecting Katy ISD Students

KATY MAGAZINE

April 11, 2018

A technical issue, shortly after the STAAR test began on Tuesday, kicked out many students across the state including Katy ISD.

The delay in service persisted for about 20 minutes, the TEA said.

"We believe no student information was lost during this time. We are still collecting data on the issue – there were about 1,000 school systems statewide that had a least one student who experienced the disruption," said DeEtta Culbertson, with the Texas Education Agency.

More than 1,200 school systems were testing at the time, she said.

Katy ISD released the following statement Wednesday afternoon.

Dear Katy ISD Parents/Guardians,

As you may be aware, STAAR testing began yesterday across the state of Texas including at all our Katy ISD campuses. Unfortunately, soon after the test administration began, the Educational Testing Services (ETS), which is the state’s vendor for the STAAR exams, reported that a state-wide disruption to its server had caused multiple outages to its online system. These outages impacted students taking grades 5 and 8 reading, grades 4 and 7 writing, and English I. As a result, many students were inadvertently kicked out of the testing session and/or were unable to log back into the ETS system.

In addition, some students experienced the assessment “freezing” and had to temporarily log off and log back into the system. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) and ETS were immediately notified of these disruptions. Students impacted by the outages were allowed to have missed time added back to their time limit.

Katy ISD is not currently aware of any students losing their responses. However, we are working with the TEA and ETS and will be reviewing any testing trends once results are released to the district.

Thank you for your support and patience as we continue to monitor this situation which has impacted districts across the state. We will update our parents with any additional information that comes to our attention.

Katy ISD

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