Kentucky has had its share of problems with online testing, and our state is far from alone, as past blogs here, here, here, here, and here point out.

However, it looks like the massive technical hurdles presented by statewide online testing have yet to be overcome. The latest example just occurred in Tennessee, where a meltdown of online testing for the state’s new TN Ready test yesterday is throwing a monkey wrench into that state’s assessment schedule as multiple sources such as here confirm.

Reports WREG-3:

“The state's vendor for TN Ready is Measurement Inc. Its testing platform, MIST, experienced major outages statewide.”

A key lesson here is that it is apparently very difficult to simulate the strain that an actual statewide assessment program places on technology. Lots of students providing lots of input, with some undoubtedly accidentally inserting control code characters that mess up program functions, just overload systems in ways that trials don’t seem to be able to simulate very well.

This is an important issue for Common Core because affordability of the testing supposedly required is built around being able to do testing online. If that isn’t technically possible, the whole program could be in real trouble as states look at ever tightening education budgets.