Students have lost work or had to lodge unfinished NAPLAN tests after connectivity issues plagued the first day of NAPLAN Online.
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Tasmanian students were among those who lost work, or were unable to complete tests as they attempted to complete their NAPLAN tests on the new online system.
The issues have prompted the education union to renew its calls for the standardised testing model to be scrapped, after it created an "unfair system" for those affected by the technology breaches.
AEU Tasmania president Helen Richardson said NAPLAN had been in place for 10 years but had been plagued by issues, which showed that it needed to be scrapped in favour of a new way forward.
"It is such a narrow test that only delivers a small snapshot of what a school or a student is like," she said.
Ms Richardson said feedback from its members interstate had flagged the potential for server crashes after schools on the mainland started NAPLAN Online last year.
"They [NAPLAN] were warned that this might happen, you would think they'd find a better way," she said.
Launceston parent Kristen Landeg said while she didn't place a lot of emphasis on NAPLAN in her family, it was concerning but not entirely unexpected.
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"When you have that many kids trying to get online at once, it was bound to happen," she said.
A spokesman for NAPLAN said while most students had been able to submit their tests, he acknowledged the inconvenience for students.
"The technology and logistics of a national online project of this size are highly complex. Schools are familiar with these processes.
"However, inconvenience to schools and students during testing is regretted," the spokesman said.
Education Services Australia, the company responsible for the development and maintenance of the NAPLAN Online platform, is currently resolving this connectivity issue.
- Education Department spokesman
Mrs Landeg said her family prepared the best they could for NAPLAN tests but she did not spend too much time worrying about them.
However, she said it was concerning that students had issues, like her son Bailey, who lost time during his creative writing NAPLAN test.
"I was looking at the clock and every five seconds or so it was running down a minute," Bailey said.
He said he and his friends were unable to connect or login to the server the day before but were not prepared for the extent of the connective issues when they began to take their tests.
He said the issues began about 10 minutes into the test, and that he knew at least one other student who lost their entire test work.
"I wasn't able to actually complete my test," he said.
RELATED STORY: NAPLAN review 'urgently needed' says education union
An Education Department spokesman said a number of schools had experienced technical difficulties on teh first day of NAPLAN. The testing period for NAPLAN runs from 14-24.
"Education Services Australia, the company responsible for the development and maintenance of the NAPLAN Online platform, is currently resolving this connectivity issue," the spokesman said.
However, the connectivity issues did not prevent tests being submitted and it doesn't appear that there have been any issues for the second day of the test period.
As of 4pm on Tuesday, about 17,000 online tests have been submitted in Tasmanian schools.
University of Tasmania NAPLAN researcher Damon Howe said one of the major issues with NAPLAN in the past has been its "inability to provide clear and timely data that schools can use to drive improvement."
He said the issue has been caused, in large part, due to the considerable lag between students completing the pen and paper test, having them sent around the country, then assessed and sent back.
"In my opinion, the move to NAPLAN online will be a great thing if it means schools can access their students' results more quickly and use them to inform school improvement," he said.
However, he said moving about 50 per cent of the more than a million who complete NAPLAN each year, to NAPLAN Online was "sure to cause headaches for a percentage of schools."
"Early reports suggest that the majority of students who worked with the online version were able to submit their work successfully, and while technology problems would certainly have made an already stressful situation even more stressful for some students and teachers, I believe the trade-off will be worth it if schools can access student data quicker and use it along with their other methods to drive school improvement."
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