I wrote last year (such as here, here and here) about how computer testing woes had caused major problems for state school testing in Kentucky and other states.

So, I was interested to see if problems would repeat in spring 2014. Though computer-based state testing problems surfaced early on in Kansas during the spring 2014 test period, never-the-Less, Education Week reported on May 5, 2014 that “Early Reports Suggest Few Field-Testing Snags” regarding computer-based testing.

Well, maybe that upbeat headline was a little premature.

It now turns out that those problems in Kansas have mushroomed to the point that the state won’t even release any testing results due to massive corruption of the data.

Kansas was not alone with problems.

Education Week also reported that Florida and Oklahoma “suspended online testing at some point during testing windows in April because of computer glitches that led to slow load times or kicked students out of the assessment systems.” The same article says there were problems in Indiana, too.

For Oklahoma and Indiana, it was the second year of problems in a row.

An additional issue surfaced in this year’s reports. Most states don’t require providers of digital services to publicly report security compromises. That was true in Kentucky until the start of the new legal year, after the end of the 2013-2014 school term, too (That’s when new rules on digital security from House Bill 5 from the 2014 Regular Legislative Session finally took effect).

So, Kentucky might have had issues that simply were not reported, maybe not even to the Kentucky Department of Education. After all, there was no requirement to make such reports.

In any event, one major testing glitch continues in Kentucky. To my knowledge, there still is no fix for the open-response questions on the high school End-of-Course tests. Thus, ironically, while our state board of education has told us again and again that the high costs of such test elements is warranted, they have not provided the products in the past two years.

And, many Kentucky schools reverted to paper and pencil testing this year, so we really didn’t exercise the computer-based testing system very much, which means problems may still be lurking out there.