I hope that Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, reads this article:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/
Month: May 2020
UPDATE on AP Exam Uploading Issues
AP Exams continue next week, 5/18/2020 through 5/22/2020. Students are gambling with timing the uploading of their answers.
AP Exam takers lost network connectivity in some cases !!!
I had three of my tutoring students take the Calculus BC exam yesterday. All of them felt well-prepared, but ONE out of THREE lost their network connection which made it impossible to finish.
(UPDATE: Instead of the reasons given in the Chronicle article below, the problem might be due to system overload near the end of the exam – uploading of results near the end of the test bogged down and the exam timer closed the test before the uploads could complete. This is an unproven but plausible hypothesis given that the College Board may not have had enough students to load test the system before the real exam was given. More in the Comments section following this article.)
Apparently they were not alone according to the San Francisco Chronicle. I found this article this afternoon while reading Diane Ravitch’s blog.
The College Board claims that this happened to only 1% of test takers.
Hmmmm???
From the Chronicle article:
“A Twitter post on Wednesday from the company’s official account said, “While more than 99% of students successfully submitted their AP exam responses today, some who didn’t told us they had trouble cutting and pasting their responses. We took a closer look and found that outdated browsers were a primary cause of these challenges.”
It advised that people who had issues submitting their exams update their browsers to the latest version of either Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Microsoft Edge.
The College Board also posted a link to a new troubleshooting page.
An earlier Tweet from the organization suggested that the problem had to do with the interface not accepting the default format of iPhone photos and that images would have to be converted to the widely-used digital format known as a jpeg.
The messaging did not sit well with the Twitter account’s followers who, in the replies thread, accused the College Board of “blaming the students” and said, “This is disappointing.”
The technical problems affected students across the country.”
Will “Online Learning” Work?
The COVID-19 pandemic required the abrupt closure of schools and an almost overnight shift to attempts at online education.
Implementation has been very uneven, and, combined with cries about “equity problems,” led to the cancellation of grades for spring semester 2020 locally and at many places across the nation.
How can we make school work going forward? This *in-depth* article examines the many behind the scenes challenges of which parents may not be aware and discusses possible ways forward.
EduIssues 