The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has announced that the Math and Reading tests, conducted to test the knowledge skills of students in these subjects, have been postponed till 2022 due to the rising pandemic situation.

Conducted once in two years, the evaluations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress is used for the Report Card of the Nation and was expected to be conducted earlier in the year for thousands of students studying in 4th and 8th grade but the model utilizes shared equipments and outsider proctors to conduct the exam which would have been difficult in the current scenario of the COVID pandemic.

James Woodworth, NCES Commissioner, said that if the exam got postponed to the next year i.e. 2021, it would not only risk spending millions of dollars but the produced data would still not be authentic to compare state and national performance of the students.