Pennsylvania has lagged behind many other states when it comes to moving the Big Standardized Tests on line. I suspect this is related to a small disaster in our state's testing history. If you are a teacher of a certain age, you probably recall years ago when the state decided to try the practice test in an online form. I'm not in a position to say exactly what happened, but it certainly seemed like the kind of thing that would happen if a hundred thousand students tried to log on to a system set up to handle about ten. Schools across the state wasted the better part of a day trying to get their students to connect with and complete the online version of the test.
Let me state that I am not a fan of BST. We can drop the T and just call it what it is. However, I was my school's testing coordinator for most of my career. Somehow an MS in school counseling made me the perfect candidate I guess. Anyway, when we were doing the paper version of the test, I spent approximately 80 hours during testing season organizing, coordinating, scheduling, counting, documenting, etc. The switch to online testing was a pain the first year, but got better. By the end of my career, the duties were switched to the Dean of Students and he spent way less time on it than I did. And the savings to the state in printing and shipping costs was likely significant. There are issues with online testing but if you are going to do statewide testing, figuring out a way to do it online is the way to go.
Let me state that I am not a fan of BST. We can drop the T and just call it what it is. However, I was my school's testing coordinator for most of my career. Somehow an MS in school counseling made me the perfect candidate I guess. Anyway, when we were doing the paper version of the test, I spent approximately 80 hours during testing season organizing, coordinating, scheduling, counting, documenting, etc. The switch to online testing was a pain the first year, but got better. By the end of my career, the duties were switched to the Dean of Students and he spent way less time on it than I did. And the savings to the state in printing and shipping costs was likely significant. There are issues with online testing but if you are going to do statewide testing, figuring out a way to do it online is the way to go.