After the Computer Based Testing Center experienced an hours-long server failure Tuesday that delayed testing for hundreds of University students, the Office of Assessment and Evaluation determined the problem was caused by a glitch in the center’s outdated software that Testing Lab Manager Derek Wilson said was at least seven years old.
The software OAE currently uses is version 3.4, but the newest version is much more sophisticated than that.
“We’re at least two major releases behind, and that’s much farther behind than we’d like to be,” Wilson said.
So far behind, in fact, that the vendor stopped supporting version 3.4 at the end of the summer and even discontinued tech support, which is why it took so long to get testing back up after the server failure.
OAE personnel had to beg the vendor to allow them to use the program for just one more semester, Wilson said. The vendor agreed, giving OAE time to ask the Student Technology Fee Oversight Committee to purchase updated software.
While the $192,383 request was granted in September, OAE couldn’t implement it in time. They’ve spent the fall semester “working out all the bugs” so the new technology will work with the University’s system.
It will be implemented for the spring 2014 semester.
Tuesday’s problem was entirely due to the obsolete program, Wilson said. When trying to enter new data, the software didn’t comprehend the change.
“The software should have been able to handle a null function without shutting down,” Wilson said. “Once we rebooted the server [when it first went down], it kept doing the same thing and locking up. When we finally identified the problem, we had to rewrite the function.”
Fortunately, Wilson said, the Computer Testing Center was able to reschedule all of Tuesday’s tests for that evening or during the day Wednesday. Though the center was tightly packed, he said making sure everyone tested was more about having enough proctors to monitor students than having enough seats.
Of the 150 students in B52 Himes Hall when the server failed, none lost their work.
Wilson said grades for students taking ISDS and math tests — about 30 percent — were recorded because those testing programs aren’t actually tied to the OAE system.
As for the others, OAE physically backed up each test so no work was lost.