New Jersey's transition to computer-adaptive statewide assessments, developed by Cambium Assessment under a $58.7 million two-year contract, has pushed spring 2026 graduation exam results to late summer or early fall — months later than the June 17 turnaround districts received in 2025. The delay affects the NJGPA-Adaptive, which juniors must pass to earn a diploma, and the NJSLA-Adaptive for grades 3 through 9.
Under the prior NJGPA, administered by Pearson, spring 2025 Individual Student Reports reached district offices by June 17, 2025, according to an NJDOE broadcast memo. That gave schools the summer to schedule remediation and portfolio-pathway classes for seniors at risk of not graduating. For spring 2026, the state agency's FAQ states that scores will not be available until after performance-level standard-setting is completed and the State Board adopts new cut scores, and that it is possible students will not receive their scores until the fall.
John Boczany, director of NJDOE's Office of Assessments, told the State Board on July 1 that while reporting is delayed this first year because of extensive hand-scoring of the ELA writing prompts and the standard-setting requirements, the department expects earlier reporting in subsequent years. Beginning with the 2026–27 school year, districts should receive spring results by June 30, according to Boczany.
The state signed a two-year contract with Cambium for $58,683,376, covering administration through spring 2027. The prior one-year contract with Pearson and New Meridian was $37,950,970, according to NJ Spotlight News.
Uneven burden on low-income districts
Pass-rate disparities map onto district wealth, according to NJ.com. In the wealthiest fifth of New Jersey districts, where roughly 18 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, about 1 in 4 juniors failed math. In the poorest fifth, where roughly 82 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, nearly 2 in 3 failed. For ELA, about 1 in 7 failed in the wealthiest districts, compared with more than 1 in 3 in the poorest.
The technical reasons for the delay
NJDOE has attributed the delay to two factors: the hand-scoring of ELA writing responses, which are used to train and verify the computer scoring system, and the one-time standard-setting process for the new adaptive assessment. The agency stated that a significant part of the timeline involves educators hand-scoring student writing, and that this process is standard when a state signs a contract with a new testing company.
The NJDOE FAQ confirms that standard-setting is not a yearly event and only occurs when major changes are made to a test or when a new assessment is implemented. It requires educator panels, psychometric supervision, and State Board adoption of cut scores, all of which extend the first-year reporting timeline. The agency has acknowledged that the delay is structural to the transition, not an operational failure.
The spring 2026 NJGPA-Adaptive testing window is March 16 through April 1, 2026. NJSLA-Adaptive runs from April 27 to May 29, 2026. Results from the fall NJGPA retake, which begins October 13, are expected before winter break, according to NJDOE spokesperson Michael Yaple.
How other states handled similar transitions
Nebraska's 2023 standard-setting for revised ELA and math standards on its NSCAS Growth adaptive assessment produced a similar reporting delay. The 2022–2023 technical report from the Nebraska Department of Education and NWEA documents that standard-setting meetings took place in July 2023, with Individual Student Reports not delivered until September 18, 2023, roughly four to five months after the spring testing window, which ran from April 3 to May 12. Nebraska's experience mirrors New Jersey's pattern of delayed results driven by standard-setting requirements.
New York State's transition to computer-based testing for its grades 3 through 8 ELA and math assessments was presented to the Board of Regents as a multi-year phased rollout, acknowledging the need for field testing, platform validation, and standard-setting before operational scoring. The Regents documentation emphasizes that moving from fixed-form paper to computer-based or adaptive formats routinely requires extended first-cycle reporting timelines.
Tennessee's TCAP assessment procurement explicitly builds reporting-timeline expectations into contracts. The state's RFP, with an estimated $200 million contract over 70 months, lists on-time, uninterrupted delivery, timely and accurate scoring, and timely, useful reporting as high-level goals. The RFP language illustrates that some states contractually require vendors to meet reporting schedules, in contrast to New Jersey's first-year delay under Cambium.
What research says about adaptive testing transitions
The Nebraska NSCAS Growth Technical Report from 2022–2023 documents that transitioning to an adaptive assessment requires building a large, robust item bank, conducting field testing, and running a formal standard-setting process with educator panels — steps that extended the reporting timeline to roughly four to five months after the spring test window. The report found marginal reliability estimates above 0.80 and strong correlations with MAP Growth, supporting the validity of adaptive results once the transition is complete. The report is a single-state technical report and does not isolate the effect of reporting delays on district operations.
Research published in the Journal of Computerized Adaptive Testing examines item bank transition rules in adaptive testing systems. The study found that the design of transition rules between item banks, such as when moving from field-test to operational pools, can affect student ability estimates and achievement-level classifications. The study used simulations and found that, on average, classification accuracy remained high, but certain transition rule configurations introduced bias at the tails of the ability distribution. The research is simulation-based and not an evaluation of real-world reporting delays.