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.