AP: State Officials Will Seek Outside Review Of ISTEP+ Results

Kyle Stokes / StateImpact Indiana

State superintendent Glenda Ritz makes a presentation to the State Board of Education.

Following news Tuesday that final ISTEP+ exam results might not be available until July — the latest symptom of the computer glitches that caused widespread disruptions to testing in April — Indiana Department of Education officials told the AP they’ll seek a third-party review of the scores:

DOE spokesman Daniel Altman said Wednesday it had begun the process of selecting an independent evaluator to assess the test’s validity.

The announcement comes shortly after test contractor CTB/McGraw-Hill said that problems with the online exam would likely delay results until July.

At this point, we’ve just given the IDOE a list of students who experienced interruptions during the assessment administration. No determinations have been made yet about validity, but the reporting delay is tied to that review process,” said Brian Belardi, spokesman for McGraw-Hill Education.

As we reported Wednesday, local school leaders are determining which students’ tests the computer problems interrupted. Ultimately, schools will have to sign off on the scores they’ll accept and the results they’ll reject.

“In a perfect world, I would like to see that the state of Indiana invalidates all the scores and they say to CTB, ‘You owe us another year on our contract. This has gone awry, it didn’t work, and we’re going to invalidate this,’” said Judy DeMuth, superintendent of the Monroe County Community School Corporation. “The realism of it is that I believe that the scores will be used in the state of Indiana, and we owe it to our students to do the very best we can to get the most realistic picture of those scores.”