MAP Testing- hopefully not the apocalypse

MAP testing starts Monday morning. Doug and Zach have been working on getting it running. Here is Doug's summary of the situation.

After spending the better portion of this week troubleshooting, I've concluded that the Virus Scanning application on all the district computers is a large detriment to MAPS. In simplistic terms, when TestTaker starts up, it is copying all of the student info and test questions from the server to a temporary location on the C: drive. this is a fairly large amount of data and can be slow when many computers are doing this all at once, without any delays. At the same time, our anti-virus application is doing what it is supposed to - scanning every single file that gets saved or copied to the hard drive. The natural drawback is that this also slows the loading process as each file pauses for a fraction of a second to be scanned. Eventually, the TestTaker either times out or believes that one of the files is corrupt and produces the error that you are all familiar with by now. The first solution I thought of was to remove the Virus Scan and this is what I've done at OMS in both labs. After all that, I thought of a better (i.e. easier) way to help this morning. I pushed a setting through the Application launcher this morning that will disable the service controlling the scanner. It will be/was pushed out to any computer that uses a MS/RC or EL student login today. after this setting is in place, a reboot is required for it to actually be in effect. Time for the payoff - to ensure that all machines are set to go Monday morning. Please make sure that any computers that will be used for testing gets logged in once today by a student user, then reboot, or just wait and shut down this afternoon. When they start on Monday, the scanner will be disabled and the tests will load correctly. This won't prevent 100% of the problems, but I think will help with a large majority of them. I expect there to be a few instances where the load still hits the time out period, but it will be due to too many loads running at the same time, instead of the Virus scanner. In this case, just go back to the student selection screen and try again until it loads. Finally, if you want to be sure the virus scanner is disabled, check the taskbar icon. Normally, it is the blue box with the "bouncing ball" running through. When disabled, the blue box will have the classic Red Circle with a line through it.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Impending nightmare of MAP testing

We did MAP testing last fall, and it was a nightmare. Horrible technical problems. Teachers in tears because they were futilely trying to get students logged in. NWEA tech support was barely any help. They told us to turn off anti-virus on our servers, which we did, but it only helped a little. I consulted the neighboring districts that use MAP and asked for help. We finally decided that the problem must be that our servers were not powerful enough for it. At the time, NWEA's system requirements for the server were a joke. Pentium III 1.3 GHz with 256 MB RAM, I believe. 

Anyway, we limped along and then went to the Board to ask for contingency funds to buy a dedicated server (we had been running each instance on a building file server). We got it, and have the server ready. 

But now that the spring testing window is here, other districts (who wisely test only once a year), are experiencing the same issues we did, in spite of successfully testing a year ago.

Here are some descriptions of the problems:

We just started yesterday, and we are experiencing some issues that we didn't have last year. Slowness to load, slowness between questions, timeouts and kids getting booted out of the test. If anything, our infrastructure is faster this year than last year. We didn't have any of these problems last spring. 

Do your proctors set up testing areas before the kids come in? Ours have always done that without problem, and this time we had reports where it would appear to time out. They had it on the screen that says "start test". We never had issues with this in the past, and NWEA says there is no time out set.

One proposed solution was

The other thing that we have done so that we don't bring the server to it's knees is stagger the start of the tests between schools and labs within the school.  Even if you only wait 5 minutes it can make all the difference.  From what I've gathered from the MAP tech support is that during the first five minutes of the students taking a test there is a spike of traffic between the work station and server.  Once the students get through those first minutes it relaxes a bit and a new group of students can get on. 

We tried this last year, and it did help somewhat, but the NWEA support people I talked to said it should have nothing to do with it. 

I am very worried about our spring MAP testing experience.