Indiana students may be seeing some major changes to their ISTEP+ tests this year, though they may not be filling in as many bubbles with heavy dark marks as initially planned.

The 2015 ISTEP+ test, to be administered to over four hundred thousand students in grades three through eight, was originally expected to undergo changes that would’ve lengthened the exam by as much as seven hours, more than doubling its size from previous years.

The lengthened test in part resulted from the Department of Education’s lack of a pilot test that would’ve sampled the validity of questions on a smaller subset of students before issuing it to the entire state.

“Since the Department of Education didn’t do the pilot test, as it said it would, they are making the whole spring ISTEP+ a pilot. That means they will determine which questions will apply to the student’s score after they grade the results,” stated Marc Lotter, director of external relations for the Indiana State Board of Education. “When the State Board asked the DOE about this in September, they said it would only add a few questions. As you can see, it did a lot more than that.”

On Feb. 9, the DOE was taken to task by Gov. Mike Pence, who issued an executive order to cut the length of the exam back down to around six hours.

“Parents and teachers across Indiana are stunned and outraged at this news, and so am I,” Pence said during a press conference. “I am committed to seeing this test through and to bring common sense to shorten it for Hoosier families.”

In order to find ways to reduce test times, officials are in contact with nationally-recognized experts on assessments which, according to Pence’s statements, may include making the social studies and reading portions of the exam more concise. However, in spite of the executive order, final say on the length of the test still rests with state superintendent Glenda Ritz and the DOE.

“There is so much confusion with ISTEP+ testing,” Noblesville Schools Supt. Dr. Beth Niedermeyer said. “It’s going to take some time to figure it out. We all have a lot of questions.”

As new changes are announced, Niedermeyer said building principals will be in communication with parents to keep them updated.

“We’ll be communicating through multiple venues,” she said.

Annetta Petty, director of curriculum for Noblesville Schools, said ISTEP+ testing will take place from March 2 through 11 with the second portion from April 27 through May 15.

“The major changes most students will see will be noticeable in part two (the multiple choice section) in late April to early May,” Petty said. “Those changes rest on two things: Indiana last year adopted new state standards so test items are to address those new state standards. But maybe even more significant at this point are new question formats.”

Petty said the question formats that students will be responding to on the ISTEP tests are different than those used in the past. She said the new test format will require additional thinking on behalf of students.

“The very first one, multiple correct response, is setup like multiple choice questions and students will select two or more correct responses,” said Petty. “Sometimes the question says ‘pick two.’ Sometimes the question will say ‘pick all that are correct.’ That doesn’t seem like a big deal but if you think about the test taking strategies that we’ve all be taught – eliminate the ones that aren’t true, you narrow it done to two and pick the most likely – that doesn’t apply anymore. There’s a worry that students will actually read the instructions and follow them and just out of habit pick the one best answer, but pick all when you don’t know how many all is.”

Petty said Noblesville Schools has participated in the acuity portion of the ISTEP+ test for a number of years although it is not required. She said it will be different this year in several ways with the types of questions being asked. Petty said the readiness tests are administered through the year and in the past the first portion’s test had half of its questions focused on standards from the year before. That amount dropped to one-third for the second portion and became grade level standards for the third.

“A big change in the acuity readiness 1 is that all the questions this year were on grade level standards,” Petty said. “If they started the test on Sept. 29 they were answering questions on standards that they may not even yet have been exposed to. That in and of itself has caused some consternation among students who have always done fairly well and now they are being tested on things they’ve never seen before.”

Petty added that the acuity test was a predictor on how well students will do on the ISTEP+ test.

“It does not make that claim anymore,” she said, “does not make that claim at all.”