Kansas trashed tests after hacking. Florida's test hacking being investigated. Shouldn't count.

Florida's test hacking is already getting excused by the testing company. And that's scary.

American Institutes for Research, AIR, the company that designed Florida’s new tests, confirmed that there had been a cyber attack on the server, state officials said, and Stewart then requested an investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

AIR officials say the cyber-attack will not hamper student performance on the test and did not compromise any personal student data.

That's an outlandish premature statement and should be completely ignored by investigators. Of course harm could have been done to student data.

More on the Florida hacking this week:

FDLE investigating cyber-attacks that caused testing delays in schools

TAMPA — The blank screens that some Florida students encountered during a state-mandated test last week might have been the result of more than technical glitches, the state now says. Some of the problems might have been caused by cyber-attacks.

“While most Florida students are continuing to test successfully, we now know that some of the delays in testing late last week were due to cyber-attacks on our testing system operated by American Institutes for Research,” Education Commissioner Pam Stewart said in a prepared statement released Monday afternoon.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the reports of cyber-attacks, Stewart said.

From Bob Sikes Scathing Purple Musings blog:

Kansas Was Forced to Trash Their Tests After Being Hacked, Will Florida?

Within minutes of the story breaking that Florida’s FSA tests had been hacked, State Impact reporter John O’Connor pointed out that Kansas suffered a similar fate last year. The story sounds strangely similar to Florida’s. Elle Moxley writes for KCUR radio:

“We had two good days of testing, and we got hit by something called a ‘distributive denial of service’ – a DDOS,” says (Mariane Perie, director of the Center for Education Testing and Evaluation at the University of Kansas).”That’s an outside force, a person, a program that starts throwing as much data as possible at our servers with the goal of shutting them down.”

Kansas threw out data from math and reading tests. Perie says “we just didn’t have faith that the data were going to give an accurate picture of where the students in Kansas are in relation to the new cognitive standards.”

Are the Florida Department of Education and AIR in denial? Reports Tia Mitchell with Denise Smith Ramos in the Florida Times Union:

American Institutes for Research said the denial of service, or DoS, cyber-attack did not compromise any student data and won’t affect students’ scores.