As many as 190,000 Ontario high school students waited for close to two hours for a province-wide literacy test to appear online before being told that organizers had given up on the project for the day. Technical failures — previously known as Garbage In Garbage Out — seem to have defeated well-meaning officials of the Education, Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), which was responsible for overseeing the standardized test. They at first called the failure “a minor technical issue” but later, as students filled Twitter with sarcastic remarks about being tested for their patience instead of literacy, admitted they just didn’t know what had gone wrong. “We regret to inform you that we have cancelled today’s assessment,” EQAO said on Twitter about three hours after the test’s scheduled start time. “We acknowledge that we are experiencing widespread technical issues with the online #OSSLT network.”
