Mississippi fires testing contractor who made serious mistakes

Kentucky uses same contractor

AP reports that Mississippi has fired NCS Pearson after that testing company made serious grading errors on high school tests that have impacted graduation for as many as 1,000 students.

Some students who actually performed poorly on a high school history test erroneously got high scores while other students who actually did well got inaccurately low scores that might have prevented high school graduation.

The AP article points out that this isn’t the first time Pearson made mistakes on high school exam grading that adversely impacted students. The company also had to pay for a failure of its online testing system in 2015, as well. Pearson reimbursed Mississippi $250,000 for that computer glitch.

Pearson is the prime contractor for Kentucky’s KPREP tests in Grades 3 to 8. So far, problems such as those in Mississippi have not been reported during Kentucky testing.