The city is “reevaluating” its contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill after the electronic exam scoring system the company built for the Department of Education crashed and burned this month.
A department spokeswoman, Erin Hughes, said officials had not yet decided what to do about the contract because they have been so focused on ensuring that Regents exams get graded despite repeated delays. The testing company is in the first year of a three-year, $9.6 million contract to operate the city’s “distributed scoring” system, designed to ensure that teachers do not score tests of students at their schools.
Most Regents exam scoring is finally complete, nearly a week after it was originally supposed to be and days after high schools began holding graduation ceremonies, according to the department.
But it still might take some time for scores to show up in the city’s data system, and a few exams that were taken in languages other than English or were originally marked as unreadable have yet to be graded, according to a letter that principals received this afternoon.
Teachers predicted that the glitchy grading system would yield inappropriately low scores because of graders’ frustration, and the department also appears to be anticipating a significant number of appeals of low scores. “Per session sites will continue operating to score these exams and will support superintendents in processing any appeals [link to guidance] that are submitted through the summer,” the letter to principals says.
Even on the last day of scoring, when only 6 percent of test items remained to be scored, McGraw-Hill’s electronic system went down, according to scorers at multiple sites. At one site, the crash caused administrators to post a sign on the school’s door encouraging students who were looking for their history exam scores to call 311, the city’s hotline, to complain about the grading system.
Only a handful of tests came up before the system froze today, leaving teachers reading books, chatting, and surfing the web while they waited for more questions to become available, a history teacher at a Midtown high school said.
“It’s like being in the rubber room, but we did nothing wrong,” said the teacher, who graded today at a Harlem school that he said was only partially air-conditioned.
Meanwhile, he and other teachers who spent days longer than anticipated grading exams are now figuring out how to end the school year on a positive note.
“A lot of people have not been back to their schools, to clean up their rooms, file things, or turn in grades,” said the Midtown teacher. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my seniors.”