It’s been a month now since we relaunched our online testing platform Testwise.
During that time we have experienced a high level of phonecalls to our support team and we recognise that response times have not been as quick as we would like them to be. We apologise if you have experienced delays and thank you for your patience. We’ve taken on additional staff to answer calls and help us respond to your queries as soon as possible.
We’ve listened to your comments and taken note of your feedback. In this roundup we address some of the most frequently asked questions and direct you to sources of help and support.
What’s in this roundup:
We recommend you allow yourself plenty of time to get familiar with the new platform before you enter your testing window. Once you are used to the changes we are confident they will save you time. But as with any technology upgrade it may take a little while for you to get up to full speed.
Before you start
The purpose of a sitting is to group together the students that are taking an assessment at a particular time (e.g. one class) in order to make it easier to monitor progress. We are aware however that the sittings limit of 100 students is causing additional administrative work for some schools and we're now working on increasing this limit in time for the September 2017 testing window. We will let you know the exact numbers nearer to the release date.
We take data security very seriously and have consequently introduced access codes in order to meet incoming data security regulations and further protect your student data. Having a unique access code greatly reduces the risk of a data breach.
The process of issuing access codes is also a simpler and quicker process for students.
Some schools have commented that access codes have increased their admin time needed to set up the tests. To help with this we have now added the ability to download/export all the access codes into an excel sheet where you can search and sort them, for instance by name, class group, test, in order to make it easier to issue and implement them.
Please ensure you are using one of our recommended browsers. Some users have reported issues with the tests not displaying correctly when using a browser that is not on the list. https://help.testingforschools.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3309849
During periods of very high demand, a few customers have told us that their reports are taking a long time to generate. Rest assured, your data is recorded and all results will appear within 24 hours. We are continuing to work on our systems to ensure that there will be no delay going forward.
Most reports should be generated within 5 minutes. During this busy testing period you may find it quicker to generate reports before 9am or after 3pm, to avoid peak times, particularly when running complex enquiries such as the combination report. If the problem is not resolved after 24 hours then please contact us and we will investigate further.
If you're testing more than 100 students at the same time, it’s helpful to assign start times at five minute intervals to minimise the risk overloading your school network which will result in a slowdown of responsiveness.
We are aware of an issue when running Progress Test Maths on Chromebooks. Our development team are working on a resolution and we hope to deploy it very shortly. In the meantime we advise using an alternative device for this assessment.
There are lots of sources of help