GL Assessment - Testwise System

[RichP]

Anyone else using the new GL Assessment system Testwise to administer CAT or NGRT tests? They have, after some delay, launched a new platform and it's really frustrating to use. We recently tested over 230 students with both tests and spent hours setting up when it took minutes in the old system. It's near impossible to get through to them on the phone and I've had no response to the emails I've sent.

Here are some of the issues we've encountered:

 

• A sitting must be created to allow a student to take a test. This is quite time consuming.

• Once 1 student has started, nobody else can be added. This means that when we test in-year applicants a new sitting must be created each time.

• Sittings cannot (for no obvious reason) run for more than 30-days.

• Sittings cannot be created in advance and left empty of students.

• Only 100 students (again seems rather arbitrary) can belong to one sitting. This means that my 230 students needed three sittings created.

• Once I’d created the first sitting I had to click Load More multiple times to get to the last student and then manually select the next 100, one at a time.

• Only one service can be attached to a sitting. This meant that I need to create three further sittings for the same students for the NGRT once I had done the three CAT4 ones.

• When adding individual students the student list appears to be initially sorted on internal id for students and only displays the first 20. The only way to get more students is to click Load More, giving another 20 students. It’s very time consuming to do this when adding 100s of students to the system.

• When adding students to sittings there are no filters available, and none of the filters apply to custom fields.

• When viewing a sitting students are listed alphabetically by Forename with no option to sort on surname, again inconsistency across the system.

• It’s not possible to view the activity log of a student for the test in the sitting without exiting the sitting and finding the student elsewhere.

• Only very recently was the functionality to get access codes via CSV, and even then they are available per sitting rather than per student. I had to combine 6 CSV back into one for our test session and because the CSV don’t include unique identifiers or custom fields I had a lot of work in matching them back to the data I needed to add to their final sheet.

• When adding students via bulk import the system timed out on multiple occasions, seemingly unable to cope with importing hundreds of users.

• When running reports for 234 I had to keep clicking Load More on the students select screen just to get them all to display and then scroll all the way back up to select them all. Doing this each time for the multiple reports required for the same cohort is very time consuming.

• Reports can’t be renamed once created.

• There doesn’t appear to be the ability to run tests that cross years even if the students are in the same cohort. Therefore any further students admitted into the cohort that we tested this week won’t be able to be included in group reports.

• When you rest your mouse over a field a the contents pops up in a small label over the following column.

[kirbster73]

I second all of what you say, certainly a step in the wrong direction!!! Madly frustrating.

[localzuk]

My housemate, who administered our GL Testing this year, agrees entirely with what you say!

[forkies]

I am sooooo glad I have handed this system over to an admin lady in the recent months (just before they made the change of death). Who on earth decided this new system was a good idea?

[rad]

I'm so glad they have the summer to fix all your listed glitches... have you emailed them this list?

[RichP]

Emailed to the head of the servicedesk on advice from Customer Services. No response in over a week though. I also have an outstanding call from the 16th June that's unresolved.

 

Looks like David Glover is the director of this (https://www.gl-assessment.co.uk/about-us/our-experts/) so will try to get in touch with him.

[enbiggen]

Argh! Thanks for the heads-up - this looks dire.

[jessica]

Just spoken to our contact from GL Assessment, this is what i have been told in reply to some of the points:

 

 

• Once 1 student has started, nobody else can be added. This means that when we test in-year applicants a new sitting must be created each time.
  
  • You should be able to add students once the test has started
    

   

  [*]Only 100 students (again seems rather arbitrary) can belong to one sitting. This means that my 230 students needed three sittings created.

  • You can add as many students to one sitting as you want
    

   

  [*]Once I’d created the first sitting I had to click Load More multiple times to get to the last student and then manually select the next 100, one at a time

  • You should be able to select all students in one go
    

   

  [*]Only one service can be attached to a sitting. This meant that I need to create three further sittings for the same students for the NGRT once I had done the three CAT4 ones.

  • This is correct, only one type of test can be added to a sitting
    

   

  [*]When adding students via bulk import the system timed out on multiple occasions, seemingly unable to cope with importing hundreds of users.

  • This should not be a problem anymore
    

[localzuk]

Lots of "should" there. Doesn't match the reality...

 

Definitely can't do the first 3.

[jessica]

I have just created a test sitting and it does appear that once a student has started no one else can be added. I will follow this up though.

I have the option to select all students when creating a sitting. There is a tick box at the top of the left hand column.

[TechMonkey]

Also found that if you are having login issues check the URL has the correct site code. Just had a fun one where a user reset their password because it wouldn't log them in and it wouldn't recognise the new password. Checking, it looks they found the testwise login from a Google search and this has set the site code to someone else's. The issue is it doesn't ask you at any point to confirm your code or enter a new one so I have had to copy and paste for them.

[RichP]

I received a detailed response from David Glover concurring with many of the issues that I raised, many of which are on a roadmap to be addressed before September. I've also spoken to the product manager for the platform who went through the changes that were being proposed in detail. They acknowledge that the way the platform was rolled out and the initial capacity weren't sufficient. Shortly GL Assessment will be sending out an email detailing the improvements that they will be making so I won't post the full run down here just yet, but it looks promising.

[Sylv3r]

I've just had an e-mail to say this will be offline next Wednesday for updates due to customer feedback. Will be interesting to see if anything on the above list is fixed.

[Love_Sausage]

I hope it isn't down on that day (tomorrow), we've tests scheduled and no word of that from them..

 

We had a yeargroup ready to do the NGRT today, with impeccable timing 15 minutes before the test was due to start our internet went out. Didn't come back until an hour later - longest outage for over a year. Test abandoned.

[eddyc]

I hope it isn't down on that day (tomorrow), we've tests scheduled and no word of that from them..

 

We had a yeargroup ready to do the NGRT today, with impeccable timing 15 minutes before the test was due to start our internet went out. Didn't come back until an hour later - longest outage for over a year. Test abandoned.

 

Tomorrow is Tuesday but their outage is planned for Wednesday.

 

I've had the email too, hopefully they've taken our feedback on board and will simplify things a bit

[Love_Sausage]

You're right - you know it's a bad week when you've lost track of what day it is, and it's only Monday.

 

We have tests tomorrow AND Wednesday, I'll ring them tomorrow to confirm.

[smurfomatic]

Had nothing but hassle with this. They've also removed the ability for a pupil to "resit" a test, for example if they're interrupted part way through.

 

Finally got a reply last week to my frantic email, asking about the brief comment along the lines of "Maths tests don't work properly on Chromebooks, use something else." Shame the reply came three weeks after sending the email and two weeks after we'd done the tests!

[RichP]

They have just sent this out:

 

We’re making changes based on customer feedback

Testwise Update ? bug fixes and improvements

 

 

 

Many of you will have already used the upgraded version of Testwise that we launched in April. In fact, this week we reached the milestone of 1 million tests taken since launch.

 

We have spent the last month gathering more detailed feedback from customers about their experiences of the new platform, so we can make changes and improvements in the future.

What fixes and updates have we deployed so far?

Click on the links to see more details

 

• Chromebooks – resolved problems experienced when using Chromebooks to take assessments

• Progress Test Maths – fixed an issue with drag and drop question types

• Access codes – introduced a CSV download option, for easier sorting and distribution of access codes

• Combination reports – fixed a problem that was preventing some customers from running combination reports

• Reports timing out – increased our server capacity to stop reports timing out

 

More changes coming soon

 

The following changes are in development and we plan to have them ready by the start of September.

 

• Bulk update of student bank records

• Ability to load more than 20 student records at a time on a page

• Increase sitting size to 300 students

 

 

We will email you again once these changes are ready.

 

 

Maintenance closures

 

You may have noticed that we have taken Testwise down for essential maintenance a couple of times. Going forward we will always email you in advance to notify you of any closures so you can work around them, and there will be a notice on the Testwise login page as a further reminder.

[Stutwo]

I spoke to them about downtime, only after 6pm Wednesdays. Not sure what the latest ones are for, the useful changes are all now "by the start of September". Having said that, all our tests this week have run smoothly, just the very occasional "URL not found" which is often resolved by logging out and back in again.

[crwardell]

I spoke to them about downtime, only after 6pm Wednesdays. Not sure what the latest ones are for, the useful changes are all now "by the start of September". Having said that, all our tests this week have run smoothly, just the very occasional "URL not found" which is often resolved by logging out and back in again.

Yep we had the url problem, refreshing the page a few times seemed to do the trick for us...

[Penfro]

I can't speak for the subsequent analysis but the pupil adminstration of the GL Assessments package is an absolute nightmare and the latest revision is even worse than the last one which was awful!

 

At least the bug that stopped the import when more than one person had the same firstname and lastname (even though a unique UPN) has gone (We had eight instances of the same name!) but the administration of tests is so much clunkier than before.

[Ashfold]

it is quite telling that the ISEB who do private school pretests still use the old version

[Network_Boy]

I've also had absolute nightmares with this terrible, terrible software. We subscribe to their PASS assessment software. I set up the original sittings in June 2016. CSV import from SIMS, was pretty painless. All worked well.

 

Then I had to set up for the same assessment in June 2017. As this was a new academic year, all the students in the system all had the incorrect year groups and class names. Turned out the only way to edit this information was to go into EVERY individual record, and edit them that way. There was no bulk edit process. Getting all the current student information correct, archiving old year groups, and removing students who had left took over 8 hours. It was like pulling teeth.

 

One of our teachers has now subscribed to their spelling test software, so I'm now looking into doing the academic rollover information editing again. When I moaned about the lack of a bulk process last June, I was promised that this would be fixed by September 2017. I've just logged in again now, and unless I'm missing something, it looks exactly the same and there doesn't seem to be any bulk edit process. I've sent them a support email, no reply yet. I will not be happy if I have to sit there and do another 8 hours of individual record editing!

 

How can (from what I can garner) a market-leading software provider produce such inadequate software? Surely the year rollover process is fairly integral!

[forkies]

I've also had absolute nightmares with this terrible, terrible software. We subscribe to their PASS assessment software. I set up the original sittings in June 2016. CSV import from SIMS, was pretty painless. All worked well.

 

Then I had to set up for the same assessment in June 2017. As this was a new academic year, all the students in the system all had the incorrect year groups and class names. Turned out the only way to edit this information was to go into EVERY individual record, and edit them that way. There was no bulk edit process. Getting all the current student information correct, archiving old year groups, and removing students who had left took over 8 hours. It was like pulling teeth.

 

One of our teachers has now subscribed to their spelling test software, so I'm now looking into doing the academic rollover information editing again. When I moaned about the lack of a bulk process last June, I was promised that this would be fixed by September 2017. I've just logged in again now, and unless I'm missing something, it looks exactly the same and there doesn't seem to be any bulk edit process. I've sent them a support email, no reply yet. I will not be happy if I have to sit there and do another 8 hours of individual record editing!

 

How can (from what I can garner) a market-leading software provider produce such inadequate software? Surely the year rollover process is fairly integral!

 

If you do import students again and do a new csv it should match the students by their unique identifier and update the year group etc.

 

But yes, it is terrible in every other way possible.

[Network_Boy]

If you do import students again and do a new csv it should match the students by their unique identifier and update the year group etc.

 

But yes, it is terrible in every other way possible.

 

Ah OK, thank you. I shall give this a whirl!