The grade level norms are averages and should not be used to set expectations or goals for students. The student score compared to the norm provides a perspective about how each student, or the class, or the grade level is performing. The NWEA MAP test assessments reveal precisely which academic skills and concepts your child has acquired and what he/she is ready to learn. NWEA MAP Suite reports allow teachers to better target instruction based on students’ strengths and needs.
NWEA MAP has technical issues during prime testing times (fall, winter, and spring). It is as if the system gets overloaded and cannot handle all of the students logged on at once.
I would like to be able to see the reports immediately. Currently, you have to wait until the next day for the scores to be available.
It would be nice if it communicated in real time with our other student database systems. We have to do a nightly update to share information with other systems, and still, some data gets stuck and needs to be "wiped".
The intervention tracking system, OnTrack, is difficult to set up and manage.
Assessment item banks could offer a better variety of items.
Illuminate DnA is a very usable system. A few items to learn and set up can be a bit time-consuming. However, once set up it is easy to use and powerful for a school that staff can master quickly. It has more features then we actually use but I hope we will over time.
The customer service is phenomenal! Every time I call, which is not very often, I always get a friendly agent that works hard to solve my problem and does not give up. They look at all angles of the issue and will go above and beyond to help. For example, our students are rostered by connecting NWEA MAP Suite to our SIS, and sometimes there is a glitch. NWEA will call the other software company if necessary, to help get the glitch fixed.
Our issue was never resolved so that we could use the software to produce accurate reports. Their tech department looked into the issue several times and could never figure out why our student was off and then they just closed the case. They confirmed we were performing the correct steps to load the data and they confirmed our data looked accurate. Great, but again why was our student count off?
NWEA MAP Suite is more directly aligned to our college and career readiness state standards and ACT. The questions are more rigorous than Renaissance Star Assessments. The reports on the NWEA MAP Suite are more detailed and exact in where the data came from.
Illuminate DnA offers more flexibility and additional features that our previous Data Director system offered. We were looking for a system that offered an online assessment portal and the ability to create elementary standard-based report cards when we selected the illuminate DnA software. We were impressed with the ability to easily create custom reports and liked the comprehensive student profile page.
NWEA MAP is a valuable tool for our district in terms of assessment data. I do not deal with the money directly, but from the teacher standpoint, it is a quality product.
We tried to get the product to work for our needs for over a year and could not get it to work and therefore it cost us $20,000 with no results and easily over 40+ hours of wasted time.
