Widespread tech issues, largely due to a conflict between Grammarly and the ACT online platform, resulted in roughly 100 freshman and sophomores being sent home as the rest of their classmates continued to take the ACT.
“Our proctor just said, ‘you guys have to do it a different day, you have to leave,’ so we just got up and left,” freshman Caleb Martin said. Martin was able to find a ride home with his sister, but that was not the case for everyone.
“My friend, he just waited until 3:15 so someone could get him… he just walked around,” Martin said. According to Martin, students that were dismissed were not allowed to wait inside.
“You could only be inside if you needed to call someone,” Martin said.
Assistant Principal Michaela Wragge said that students were not required to wait outside.
“Students could wait in the vestibules, students could wait for rides inside,” Wragge said. “I would like to know more specifically who was told that they had to wait outside because that should never have happened.” She said that the confusion was likely due to miscommunication between administration and students.
“It didn’t all happen at once, it was this trickle effect,” Wragge said. Wragge was eventually able to go down to the office and explain that the reason students were leaving was due to technology issues.
“[Prior to that point], I don’t know if adults assumed [that] students were kicked out, [and not that they were] leaving due to something they can’t control,” Wragge said.
The morning of the test Wragge received calls from Millard North and Millard West warning of the tech issues. She spoke to Tech Facilitator Mary Kucera to discuss fixes and emails went out to all of the teachers.
“All of the sudden it was like, the storm hit… by about 9:35-9:40 there were so many messages coming in,” Wragge said. By 10 a.m., if a student had not begun the test they were sent home in accordance with ACT’s testing timeline.
The technology issues stemmed primarily from Grammarly. According to Wragge, the program interfered with TestNav, which runs the online ACT. Grammarly operates on top of other programs and ACT’s software is designed to be locked down, this caused a conflict. Other issues were caused by updates and long restart times. In the district, programs are often routed through filters and servers outside the building. Having thousands of people on their computers all at once slows things down. The district knew prior to testing that Grammarly might be an issue but their fix was difficult to implement on a large scale during testing. Students were told to uninstall Grammarly but many students had older software that slowed things down and made uninstalling difficult or not possible.
“[Uninstalling Grammarly] was so many steps, so confusing, and a lot of work to do the morning of,” Language Arts teacher, Alex Kirkland said. During testing, Kirkland crisscrossed the building to assist students with technology issues.
On the testing day, all of the teachers were put into online chats where they could communicate with Kirkland, Wragge and others. Prior to testing, district tech assistants were called in to the building but they were not a part of the chats.
“At one point there were 40 messages in a 90 second window, and most of those were tech related,” Kirkland said. The fact that district tech were not involved in the chats likely slowed down the assistance as the tech helpers did not always know where the issues were. For Kirkland, who knew where the help was needed, It took time to get to the different classrooms and in the interim some students were sent home.
“Well, sometimes there was district tech right in the hallways that could have popped in had there been that awareness,” Kirkland said.
Kirkland had a solution to the Grammarly issue that involved disabling the program. Once the solution was proposed it was fully implemented by district tech. It was still difficult to coordinate the assistance though, with district tech being less familiar with the building, Kirkland said.
Martin said he first realized that there were going to be testing issues when proctors were taking a long time to get people started on the test.
“People’s laptops were updating for a while and they made us restart. But then, some [of us] just started getting errors. I was like, ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this,’” Martin said.
Martin said that his parents were a little upset that he was not able to test and would have to make it up.
Students will have an opportunity to re-test on April 16 and 17 in the lecture hall and district tech will be there.
Wragge said that recently ACT has been heavily promoting online testing, likely because ACT makes more money that way. She said that she would much prefer paper pencil testing because it allows more variables to be controlled.
“You can’t really mess up a paper and pencil [test],” Wragge said.
For the future, adding district tech to the chats used during testing would be very beneficial in order to better assist with tech issues, Kirkland said. He said that having the chats available at all, though, was extremely helpful.
“Having the chats pre-created with the room numbers was huge,” Kirkland said. “[The chats were] such a game changer,” allowing for better communication between teachers and the people assisting them.
According to Kirkland, following all of the technology struggles, the severity of the Grammarly issue is better realized at the district level.
Kirkland said that even if students had been asked to uninstall Grammarly prior to testing they may have been hesitant to do so.
“[Grammarly] is one of the most used apps in the district,” Kirkland said. He said that he wished he would have had an opportunity to tell testing students to disable the program and explain how to teachers.
“If I would have known that was going to happen, believe me, I would never have put our students in that situation. I want it to be as easy as possible. I want you to be able to come in, take your test, and enjoy your afternoon,” Wragge said.
Wragge said that administrators will be very intentional about what happens before beginning any online tests in the future, but that the choice between online and on paper is not always up to them. For students who did manage to start testing, everything went smoothly.
