We have worked all weekend with our supplier and we are still looking for what went wrong, says department head Anna Westerholm.
What made the National Agency for Education pull the emergency brake was the discovery that student names had leaked to other schools. A few days earlier, the agency had stopped part of the national tests in Swedish when it turned out that the spelling and grammar control in the system did not meet the requirements.
Hundreds of millions
The National Agency for Education has been working since 2017 to digitize the national tests in a nationwide test platform. The work has so far cost nearly 700 million kronor.
The purposes of digitized tests and centralized grading are to combat grade inflation and ease the workload of teachers. The tests can also become a prerequisite for a new grading system.
So far, schools have had to spend time and effort preparing for the new system. And now, schools must quickly prepare to let students take the tests on paper, or in their own test platform.
"Should be ashamed"
"The National Agency for Education should be ashamed of how they treat teachers", writes principal and columnist Linnea Lindquist in Expressen.
We are the first to regret what has happened. We are dismayed because we know that so many schools have prepared themselves, says Anna Westerholm.
She admits that eight years of preparation may seem like a lot.
But we have had to do things, move servers and other things, that were not planned from the beginning. And the tests that were conducted last autumn went well and there have been no indications that it would not work this spring.
Minister of Education Lotta Edholm has called the National Agency for Education's director general to a meeting about the failure on Tuesday. "I fully share the frustration that many principals, teachers, and students feel", the minister commented on Friday.
A total of 18 sub-tests in the national tests were to be conducted digitally in the National Agency for Education's test platform this spring term. But on Friday, the National Agency for Education decided to shut down the test platform.
This affects students in grades 6 and 9, as well as high school students, who will have to take the tests in another way.
The affected tests were to be written on fixed dates between March 18 and May 14.
Source: National Agency for Education
