State responds after 40,000 students affected by computer outage during end-of-grade testing

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    NORTH CAROLINA (WRAL) — An outage on Wednesday delayed thousands of students from finishing their end-of-grade (EOG) tests.

According to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, a system error caused NCTest to “not function.” The outage lasted about 40 minutes and affected approximately 40,000 students.

NCTest is the online testing system used by DPI for various standardized tests across North Carolina. The DPI said, of the 209,675 students who began a test, 171,725 completed their tests.

Wednesday night, DPI superintendent Mo Green announced three options for students affected by the outage.

1. Continue testing the same day (for those schools that did not have any data loss)

2. Pause testing and resume on May 29 (with scores delivered on May 30)

3. Declare a misadministration and restart affected students on May 29

“This local decision-making approach allowed superintendents and charter school leaders to choose the option that best served their individual school situations and student needs,” Green said.

Green also released the following statement:

We regret that this happened. We are conducting a thorough review of this incident to identify the root cause and implement additional safeguards to prevent similar occurrences. The NC Department of Public Instruction remains committed to providing reliable, secure testing platforms that support fair and accurate assessment of student learning. We will continue to monitor these systems closely and work with our technology partners to strengthen the reliability of our testing infrastructure.

– Mo Green, North Carolina Dept. of Public Instruction

Students said they are left in limbo about what will happen when they return to school on Thursday.

“It was so hard,” said Conyer Kroboth, a third-grade student at Exploris School in Raleigh. “I felt like I was going to beat it, and then boom, internet gone.”

According to the state, schools have two options for the tests: Either resume the test on Thursday or completely start the test over.

The state said some students will have to start over on Thursday. Conyer’s mother, Kira Kroboth, said she doesn’t know if any of the work her son did was saved before the outage.

“He was about halfway through the test when it froze up,” she said. “They had to sit there quietly, because [of] all of the rules around standardized testing, for an hour and a half while everyone was trying to figure out what was going on.”

Conyer Kroboth said he and his friends were studying and practicing for their tests for weeks, and they didn’t want to have to start over.

“All of that went to waste, so now, I have to restart it,” he said.

Kira Kroboth said she hopes students won’t have to start from the beginning of their tests.

“[Conyer] was really upset when the teacher wasn’t able to say if he was going to have to start all over again or not,” she said. “They just don’t know. He doesn’t want to do it again, and I don’t feel like he should have to.”

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