Pearson, the company administering the online PARCC assessment, issued a statement April 20 apologizing for technical glitches that forced schools throughout New Jersey to cancel testing for the day.
Pearson’s Statement:
Pearson is truly sorry for an issue this morning that caused a disruption for New Jersey families and their students and resulted in the cancellation of PARCC testing today in many school districts. We know that students and teachers have put in a tremendous amount of work to master the high academic standards set forth in New Jersey, and they deserve a smooth testing experience.
Every resource at our disposal is being directed toward identifying the cause of the problem and correcting it as soon as possible without creating any additional inconvenience. While our internal review into what went wrong is not yet complete, we’ve been able to ascertain that this was a technical glitch introduced by a Pearson employee — not a problem with server capacity or the student testing system.
Last night, in an effort to optimize performance of the test administration system used in New Jersey, Pearson made some adjustments that were deployed Tuesday night through Wednesday morning. In doing this, Pearson introduced an unexpected problem that restricted access to the administrative system. We are correcting the issue and will work to ensure it does not happen again.
We do apologize and continue to communicate with the New Jersey Department of Education with any and all updates.