The city canceled a contract with one testing vendor and won’t get charged by another after the companies bungled exam scoring in separate incidents earlier this year, the education department announced today.
Officials announced this afternoon that they are canceling a $9.7 million contract after the vendor, CTB/McGraw-Hill, botched a new electronic grading process for the city’s Regents exams, causing confusion for tens of thousands of students who needed scores to graduate or move onto the next grade. The city will also recoup $2.1 million from Pearson for major errors during its administration of a gifted exam.
The news comes less than three months after officials sought to downplay the issues, which included a series of technical glitches that resulted from logistical problems, faulty software and low school bandwidth. Spokeswoman Erin Hughes said the department was still negotiating how much money it would recoup from the contract, which was in its second year of a three-year deal.
As a result of the cancellation, she said, the city planned to move back to paper-and-pencil scoring in 2014.
Gotham Schools reports that there are still many outstanding challenges to the grading from last year, when some top students received very low scores on their Regents exams.
The DOE shill, Gotham Schools reports, did not return comment when asked about those challenges.
Mayor Bloomberg's vaunted technology testing experiment was a disaster.
It is good that it is over, at least for one year.
Give me a pen, stack of test booklets, and let's go.
Been doing this for 13 years.
I can tell you, we would have had all those tests knocked out so much quicker had we not been grading in the virtual world.
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