October 24th, 2016

Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, EQAO cancelled today’s online OSSLT. We are working with EQAO to determine the next steps and we will share further information online as soon as it becomes available. Students work hard to prepare for this assessment and we apologize for the inconvenience this decision has caused. We will update information on this post as it becomes available.

Please share the following link to this page for future updates. https://bit.ly/2e4FRq4

Update Monday, October 24, 2016

The Education Quality and Accountability Office has confirmed that the cause of the technical issues that resulted in the cancellation of the province-wide trial of the online Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) was an intentional, malicious and sustained Distributed Denial of Service attack—a type of cyberattack.

“I apologize to the students, caregivers and staff in Waterloo Region who put so much hard effort in to make the OSSLT online test a success,” said John Bryant, Director of Education.

WRDSB staff await information from EQAO about the feasibility of scoring completed online OSSLT assessments and we will update this page when we know more. EQAO do advise that all students will still be considered first-time eligible for the regularly scheduled OSSLT in March 2017 to satisfy their literacy requirement.