The state is taking steps to ensure that standardized testing runs more smoothly in the next school year.
Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen and Governor Bill Haslam held a press conference Monday to talk about the successes and failures of the 2018 TNReady testing.
Thousands of students took the spring TNReady test online. But it included a handful of bumps in the road that teachers, parents and superintendents said distracted from this year's testing.
There was an apparent hacking, connectivity issues and a dump truck that severed a fiber optics line. All of the problems led state lawmakers to pass legislation to keep this year's TNReady tests from counting against students, teachers and schools after days of technical difficulties.
At this point, the state will continue to work with the vendor that administered this year's TNReady tests, Questar, but they are currently in a review period with the company.
Questar has agreed to allow a third party to come in and review its technology and do a stress test on its network to ensure it can handle the job.
"We will be creating a pathway to contract amendments over the next couple of months as we begin to think about next year's programming," McQueen said.
The state's contract with Questar is up in November, but McQueen said it was likely Questar would still administer the tests in both the fall and spring, because it really didn't make sense to change in the middle of the school year.
McQueen also said the state will expand the role of a company called Educational Testing Service, which already designs and develops the social studies and science portions of TNReady. Now, ETS will also work on the the English and math sections of the test.
"(ETS is) more sophisticated in their work product, they're sophisticated in their content development, and we believe they can pull away some of the components Questar was having to focus on as a smaller company," McQueen said.
McQueen also says Questar did not give adequate customer service this school year.
To address that, the state is hiring someone to oversee testing customer service.
It includes regional training and support for the TNReady tests for schools.