FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 22, 2015
Contact: Josh Collins, 651-582-8205, josh.collins@state.mn.us

Minnesota Department of Education to Resume Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments Thursday

Roseville -- Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius has informed school districts that administration of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) will resume tomorrow.  

The department suspended testing today, after districts and students experienced issues logging into Pearson’s testing system on three days over the past two weeks. Pearson was informed that they needed to identify and resolve technical problems, and assure the department that students will have a worry-free testing experience without interruptions.

Pearson provided the department with details today about the causes of the service disruptions. Last week, the difficulties stemmed from a server failure and a server’s inability to distribute heavy loads of student traffic. Yesterday, Pearson experienced a “distributed denial of service attack,” in which someone attempted to disrupt the system by overwhelming it with web traffic. This sort of an attack was not an attempt to steal student data; rather, it was intended to disrupt testing. Pearson has assured us that at no point was any student data at risk or compromised.

Pearson has taken corrective actions to address these issues, and assured us that they are “confident that any similar service interruptions will be avoided for the remainder of the MCA testing window.”

Because of the delays, the department will extend the testing window by two days.

Read Pearson's memo to the department regarding testing issues.

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