KS2 From NCA - Anyone experiencing problems?

[LosOjos]

Despite claiming that you can enter up to 999 UPNs at a time, I found that trying to retrieve all mine at once caused it to crash upon searching.

 

Reducing the batch to 50 allowed it to search, and it even claimed to have found data, but then it crashes trying to download either the CTF (which I hear people are having trouble importing in to SIMS anyway) or even the CSV.

 

I've had to reduce the batch to 10 (!!!) at a time in order for it to work.

 

This NCA Tools website has been a complete farce for Key Stage Teacher Assessments this year.

[LosOjos]

Gah, I spoke too soon, it's completely dead now

 

How hard is it to predict traffic - they know how many high schools are in the country, so make sure your servers can handle at least one person from each of those accessing at the same time!

 

EDIT: turns out there was one UPN it just didn't like. Instead of mentioning the problem, it just crashed. I suppose it's better than the KS3 return that actually suggested everything was fine when in fact it wasn't!

 

I'd love to know how much money was handed over for this system - it's programming 101 to include useful error handling!

[CAM]

It was terrible this morning and took multiple tries to log in, then multiple tries and two different browsers to upload KS3 amendments. May try NCA for KS2 if I can download results. Got some missing and want them in before OFSTED give us a call.

 

(And ever since I heard them referred to as "The Big O" I keep thinking of The Mysterons. ---> O O ---> )

[LosOjos]

@CAM - I wouldn't bother with the KS2 yet, CTFs are fudged. You could upload manually via CSV of course but I'm going to wait for the CTF.

 

I thought at first it was just because the file name structure is wrong (it is wrong - you have to replace the "KS2" part with "CTF" for SIMS to even recognise it, which is actually not SIMS fault as it's not technically a valid CTF unless it's in that format, something you'd expect the programmer of the tool to know) but it's still invalid. Noticed there were loads of blank results in the file, deleted them, still invalid. I'm currently working through the CTF 12 schema to see if I can figure out what's wrong and fix it - I'll let you know how I get on and upload any scripts I end up writing for the rest of you if it comes to that.

[LosOjos]

I give up - the file looks fine, all the necessary fields appear to be present and valid, apart from the file name issue it looks like it should work... time to try getting at the CSV instead

[LosOjos]

UPDATE: it's apparently fixed now, however there's a new problem I'm about to call and report to them.

 

When you import your CTF, you may find some students won't import as they appear twice in the CTF. Upon inspection, these students have one set of 'L' results and one set of actual results. It looks to me like the NCA's system is returning all returned results for students, not just the relevant ones, i.e. the previous school has returned 'L' for left and the current school the actual results, but NCA returns both lots, invalidating that students entry in the CTF.

 

It's easy to fix - just delete the <Pupil> section of the CTF that contains all the L's and re-import, but it shouldn't be happening and no doubt many schools won't be confident editing a CTF manually.