Doubts over NAPLAN data after millions hit with outage
Teachers and politicians have spoken out against NAPLAN testing after widespread disruption caused chaos in thousands of schools.
Testing was abruptly halted Wednesday morning after students and teachers were unable to access the writing phase of the annual assessment online.
Teachers are calling for assessment to be canceled altogether after many schools were forced to postpone re-runs.
The national teachers’ union said NAPLAN was rife with problems and should be replaced with assessments carried out by teachers in the classroom.
“Today’s cuts, combined with the risky nature of assessment, risk increasing student anxiety and will add to teachers’ increased workload,” Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe said.
“There will also be questions about the accuracy of NAPLAN results once these assessments have finally taken place.”
The federal opposition’s education spokesman questioned the validity of the data collected on Wednesday and said the minister responsible should explain how the problems would be corrected.
“Tonight 1.4 million young people will be asking their parents about their canceled NAPLAN exams today and what this means for them,” said Julian Leeser.
“This also causes deep systemic problems. This failure can skew the entire data set.”
The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) has confirmed that students attempting to log into the online exam portal have been affected by the outage.
3rd grade students were not impressed as their evaluations were done manually.
“This matter is being urgently investigated by Education Services Australia, our technology provider that operates the platform,” ACARA said in a statement.
Although the full extent of the outage is not yet clear, more than 1.3 million students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 were scheduled to begin testing on Wednesday.
An authority spokesman confirmed testing resumed after 12pm on Wednesday after issues with the online portal were resolved.
“We apologize for the disruption caused to students and schools and thank them for their patience,” the spokesman said.
“The issue has now been resolved and schools have been advised they can continue with testing.”
Educators described the confusion and outages on social media following the widespread outage.
A Victorian secondary school teacher told AAP the outage was difficult to manage as students were left tense and agitated by the outage.
They hope NAPLAN will return to pen and paper.
The national assessment, which tests reading, writing and language rules as well as numeracy skills, moved to a fully online format in 2022.
NSW’s education standards officer Paul Martin confirmed students in the state were reporting the online portal was slow.
“Some students were able to log in, some were not. It got to the point where ACARA advised all schools to pause testing,” he said.
NSW Education Minister Prue Car confirmed there was a wide window of time for testing to take place and asked students and parents not to panic.
Andrew Smith, chief executive of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, said many students were experiencing difficulties on Wednesday morning.
Schools that did not experience problems continued testing as planned.
“We don’t have the actual numbers yet, but it looks like there are enough schools for us to be concerned,” Mr Smith told ABC Melbourne.
Victorian exams have been plagued with errors in recent years.
A bug in 2024 allowed students to access questions in advance from tutorial cover pages at the front of online booklets.
The debacle affected 65 of the 116 Victorian Certificate of Education exams and led to the sacking of the entire board of the state curriculum and assessment authority after review.
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