We are pleased to announce that this past weekend we rolled out a new release on Socrato. Some of the changes are external and can be seen by users, but most of the improvements are “under the hood” and result in improved response time. The key changes include:
User Interface
- More content – In addition to grade 3 – 5 MCAS material, more content was added for grades 6 and 7.
- Easier access to content – Question search by grade level.
- Improved reporting – The Question distribution report now shows students’ points-data for open response questions.
- More stable upload of students’ assessment data.
- Fixed a number of issues for students TIA and roster data upload process. (e.g., information for one question was captured incorrectly and the session ID was getting lost).
- Fixed a number of other bugs.
Under the Hood
- Faster performance for take test area – With a number of schools now using Scorato in their school computer labs, we needed to make improvements so the system does not slow down. We made a good number of changes to how the take test is managed in the system. This will allow our servers to support a larger number of concurrent users.
- More stable and faster reports generation – We have completely revamped how the PDF files are generated for SAT diagnostic reports. With this change, the time required for report generation has dropped significantly. The current load calculation shows that the first report is available in about 10 -15 seconds, and subsequent reports are created in less than 5 seconds. These are complex reports, so this improvement constitutes a significant improvement compared the previous time lapse required to generate the reports. Pretty cool!
If you encounter any issues with these changes and improvements, please let us know.
Looking Forward
New and improved key features which are currently works in progress include:
- Additional reports which will allow teachers and principals to slice and dice their school’s and students’ data. They will be able to leverage these reports for instruction planning. This will allow them to automatically create custom and personalized assignments from Scorato. We are very excited about this.
- Making the delivery (printing and emailing) of all reports easier.
A big thank you goes out to all who have sent suggestions, requests and issues to us. We welcome your feedback and try to act on it in a timely fashion.
-Raju
