In August of 2017, Missouri’s commissioner of education announced that statewide high school exams were so unreliable, their results would be discarded. One month later, the Utah Board of Education hired the same company Missouri did to create its new year-end assessment system, called RISE, given to all public school children in grades three through eight.
The launch of RISE this spring was marked by widespread glitches as half-completed tests were lost to frozen computer screens and whole school districts were locked out of the system. Those issues follow years of frustration with standardized testing in Utah, and have prompted questions on why the state school board chose a company with such a troubled history.