Dapto High School is all about technology. It takes great pride in being a BYOD (bring your own device) school.
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But the school's decision to go old-school and complete NAPLAN tests on paper has paid off big time.
A number of public and private school students sitting yesterday's NAPLAN test online were affected by a nationwide system glitch half way through the exam.
About 50 per cent of the tests were conducted online, up from 15 per cent last year.
Dapto High School did the online training in 2018 and was all set to do NAPLAN online.
"But we kept testing our network and our system and about two weeks out I had advice from my ICT [Information and Communication Technologies] experts warning me to be cautious," principal Andrew FitzSimons said.
"I had that same advice this year so chose to again be cautious and do the tests with pen and paper."
But Mr FitzSimons said Dapto would gladly join all other schools in the country and revert to online in 2020.
"I believe it will be sorted in 2020," he said.
"Dapto High School has brilliant ICT skill. We are blessed with very smart men and women who are into this and our network is pretty good. NBN is outstanding."
The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) stated Education Services Australia was continuing to investigate the cause of connectivity issues experienced by some schools during NAPLAN Online yesterday.
According to ACARA, parents reported the system went down for up to four minutes during the exam time.
Parents reported the system kept timing out and when it eventually reconnected, their child had lost half a page of work they had already completed.
"Any inconvenience to schools and students during testing is regretted," ACARA siad.
"If technical issues are experienced in the coming days, there are procedures in place to manage them and ensure that all students are able to take the tests. This includes taking the test on paper as a last resort."
But the P&C Federation weren't in a forgiving mood.
"This is only the latest debacle with NAPLAN Online," president Susie Boyd said.
"Last year, there were delays in publishing the 2018 NAPLAN results when ACARA realised that results from the online and paper NAPLAN tests may not be validly compared.
"P&C Federation and others had warned ACARA of these flaws long before NAPLAN Online was rolled out."