Dive Brief:

• Testing company Measured Progress will pay $1.3 million to Nevada following a botched rollout of new tests this spring that resulted in just a third of the state's students completing their assessments.
• The settlement includes a partial refund (almost $790,000) of Nevada’s original contract, as well as over $500,000 in new science assessments.
• The state is also negotiating a settlement with the company that designed the tests Measured Progress delivered, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

Dive Insight:

When Nevada’s new, online, Common Core-aligned tests hit schools this spring, things started going wrong immediately. Servers crashed whenever more than 5% of students logged in, preventing any kind of simultaneous statewide testing. Elsewhere in the country, the rollout of new digital tests was met with hacks, glitchy tests, and similar server issues.

It’s not clear if other states will follow in Nevada’s footsteps and seek out compensation for those struggles. Few other states face as comprehensive a failure as Nevada’s, considering the majority of the state’s students were unable to even complete their tests. School districts in the state have been left with little data on performance, thanks to the faulty rollout.

Despite those problems, Nevada is sticking with the online exams, as are many other states. The appeal of returning to pencil and paper will likely continue to wane as technological glitches are ironed out and the capabilities of digital testing are refined.