by Emmerson Clark | staff writer

State testing will go fully online starting with the upcoming 2023 state testing schedule. 

“So we will start with this year; all EOC testing is online, 100 percent. We don’t really have an option to do anything else, according to the state,” Assistant Principal Candace Pearson said. 

This won’t be the first time NEISD has utilized online testing.

“Over the last few years the state’s been rolling out the online testing. And I know for example like Tex Hill, for the last couple years has done all their testing online,” Pearson said. “They wanted to open it up to a few campuses, just to see how it goes.”

According to lead counselor Courtney Tarbox, online testing was used for all summer and December EOC testing as well as last year’s English II field test without incident.

Counselors plan for students who are testing to report to the A300 wing just like in previous years. Each testing room will have a Chromebook cart. Each student will be given a Chromebook to test and a testing ticket with a log-in code. Tarbox said that she does not foresee typical technological concerns interfering with students testing online.

“…The way the program works it kinda auto-saves in like a queue, so if something was to go down, in my past experience, what happens is we just close that Chromebook then we get a new one and we have the student log-in with their information and it picks up right where they left off,” Tarbox said. 

Online testing allows students and teachers to receive their results much faster than traditional, paper tests. 

“I don’t know why it started. I can imagine it’s just doing things electronically is easier than shipping paper, counting documents, you know, all that stuff,” Pearson said. “…it was actually called a field test that we did, a practice test… things went very smoothly.”

Another example of how online testing is practical is how it aids environmental concern. 

“I don’t like it sometimes because it’s not very eco-friendly to give so many students so many thick packets,” junior Elizabeth Farias said. 

However, despite these benefits, there are still some student concerns about the shift.

“I feel more, into the test than I would be on a computer staring at a screen where my eyeballs kinda burn,” Farias said. 

But as more instruction has moved online as well as standardized testing like the SAT, online testing fits the curriculum more accurately. 

“You know so much of what students do now, learning-wise, is online and so just moving in that direction and making it more realistic to what you guys are doing in class anyways,” Pearson said.