NASHVILLE – State Education Commissioner Candice McQueen and a vendor sought to reassure Tennessee lawmakers Tuesday that a testing problem involving digital scans of 9,400 students’ TNReady assessment tests has been fixed and won’t happen again.
“While we reported 99 percent of our scoring accurately, that’s not good enough,” McQueen told a joint meeting of the House Education Instruction & Programs and Education Administration & Planning committees. “We expect – we required – 100 percent, and that’s our commitment.”
Stephen Lazer, president and CEO of Questar, the testing vendor, said while checks were done, “they didn’t catch these mistakes. We know how to do it and we will. Obviously, we fixed everything and are in the process of fixing every other report at our own expense.”
He said 99.4 percent of the testing was accurate. The problem occurred due to scans of students’ paper test scores into the company’s data system.
Earlier in the day, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam downplayed the incident, saying “one error is too many, but it is important to remember this is 9,400 tests out of a million something. And it worked. Before anybody’s results were impacted or any student got their results, it was caught.”