So far so good on field-testing of the Smarter Balanced assessment.  Here’s the opened to a long EdWeek piece with interviews from all over the country:

Field-testing of two multistate online assessments is going more smoothly than many educators had expected, despite technological glitches in the coast-to-coast experiment. And even though the exams, aligned with the Common Core State Standards, are still in the tryout phase, they are proving tougher than the ones students are used to taking.

Those are the two major themes that emerged from an Education Week reporting project that examined the experiences so far of a collection of school districts across nearly half the states with the trial run of tests designed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

The field-testing, designed to find problems with the assessments before their designs become final, began in late March and runs through early June. Participation varies widely; a few states are giving the exams to nearly all students, while in most places, students in only some classrooms, at some grade levels, are involved.

Although potential technological problems with the move to large-scale online testing have topped educators’ list of concerns, district and school leaders reached for this article, with only one exception, reported relatively minor problems.

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read the whole piece here: Early Reports Suggest Few Field-Testing Snags – Education Week.