Like it or not, we must be prepared to handle students who have chosen to opt out of standardized testing. It's easy enough to simply not enter data for these students and that can work for a small student population. But if you have many students to deal with and you're collecting your assessment data manually, it can be difficult to know whether a student is missing assessment data because he opted out or it simply hasn't yet been added. This was the case in New York so we've added a new flag to their Assessments panel to indicate Opt-Out. Each individual test the student opted out of can still be added to the system because there are cases where students only opt out of a particular content area. When the Opt-Out flag is set, data requirements are relaxed for other fields like Score since there won't be any data for them. And finally, these assessment records are suppressed from being sent to MSIX since MSIX doesn't yet have a way to accommodate them.

If you'd like to have something like this in your state, just let us know.