The STAAR EOCs, also known as the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, are a fate most Highland Park High School students are forced to condone. Often, this means sitting in a room for five hours, four of which are not spent on the actual test – and many, many sharpened pencils. However, some schools opt to take the test using computers and the statewide servers – and, as usual, a multitude of issues with this option have surfaced.

“We administered the English One to our freshman students and a few upperclassmen, and during the day we had a technical glitch,” Michelle Wallis, testing coordinator at Sherman High School in Grayson County, Texas, said. “It was a statewide glitch throughout Texas.”

The issue was also felt in many other districts that opted to use computers to administer the test. In total, about 140,000 students in total across Texas felt the effects of the glitch. However, unlike a similar occasion in 2016 when 14,000 tests had to be thrown out due to a similar issue, no tests became invalid.

“They were a little worried, but remained calm,” Sherman High School Principal Christopher Morgan, who sent kids to lunch so the system could get back on track, said. “We had kids take a break, relax, eat a snack, and gradually students began to resume their test.”

The Texas Education agency confirmed that there was nothing to worry about.

“We believe no student information was lost during this time,” DeEtta Culbertson, with the Texas Education Agency, said. “We are still collecting data on the issue – there were about 1,000 school systems statewide that had a least one student who experienced the disruption.”

The problem persisted for about 20 minutes before the system was fully functional again. 1,200 school systems were testing at the time, meaning only a sixth of Texas school systems remained unaffected by the glitch.

“As you may be aware, STAAR testing began yesterday across the state of Texas including at all our Katy ISD campuses,” Katy ISD, a Houston district also hit by the glitch, confirmed in a statement on their website. “Unfortunately, soon after the test administration began, the Educational Testing Services (ETS), which is the state’s vendor for the STAAR exams, reported that a state-wide disruption to its server had caused multiple outages to its online system. These outages impacted students taking grades 5 and 8 reading, grades 4 and 7 writing, and English I.

“As a result, many students were inadvertently kicked out of the testing session and/or were unable to log back into the ETS system. In addition, some students experienced the assessment “freezing” and had to temporarily log off and log back into the system.”

Any students who lost time due to these glitches had the time restored to their 5-hour time limit.