As Mahita Karnati, sophomore, sat in the small gym awaiting her Precalculus AP exam yesterday, the testing application Bluebook failed to connect to internet. After 9 a.m., Karnati and other students with morning AP Exams were told the exams would be rescheduled to Thursday, May 22, and they returned to their second hour classes.
The district was without internet for about 24 hours starting on the afternoon of Monday, May 12, and lasting until Tuesday, May 13. A message was sent via ParentSquare Monday evening regarding the outage. This affected classes and digital AP Exams during those times.
“I was honestly pretty upset because I wanted to get it over with and finish the exam because I also have lots of finals next week,” Karnati said.
Bob Deneau, Chief Information Officer, said the outage was caused by a significant fiber cut on an AT&T fiber line that delivers internet to the district.
AT&T was eventually able to identify the location of the fiber cut and move forward to assign fiber splicing crews to repair the cut, Deneau said.
“This type of work requires precision and can take many hours to complete based on the severity of the fiber cut,” Deneau said.
Deneau said this event allows for a learning experience for the technology department at Rockwood. The district had tried several different network configurations to improve the internet conditions in particular for high schools in the district administering AP Exams.
“While outages are rare, we need to be prepared to handle them,” Deneau said. “This review and reflection process is key to improving our response procedures.”
Kendall Rackley, Precalculus teacher, said some of her students were worried about the exam being rescheduled to finals week while others were relieved to have more time to prepare.
“Some students decided not to go forward with the exam as well,” Rackley said.
Because Precalculus is not organized as an AP class at MHS, Rackley said students will still have to take the final even if they are signed up for the AP Exam unlike most other AP classes. Rackley said the course is not structured based off of College Board and offering the AP Exam for the course was something that MHS decided to do as a whole.
“Not every student was taking the exam, so I don’t have to reschedule anything for my class,” Rackley said.
Connor Gleason, junior, took the AP Physics 2 Exam yesterday afternoon. Gleason said the internet outage delayed his exam from 12 p.m. to about 1 p.m. The exam concluded around 3:30 p.m. Gleason said.
“It was quite stressful because I really wanted to take it yesterday,” Gleason said. “I wanted to get it out of the way, and I won’t be here when the makeup exam is scheduled.”
After the internet connectivity was restored, Gleason said the proctors in the testing room took precautions to ensure everyone would be able to log onto the testing platform.
“What we ended up doing was sign in row by row to not overload Bluebook,” Gleason said.
