This is more focused feedback than a suggestion, and we hope it's not taken lightly.

The NWEA Secure Browser app on Windows is notoriously worse at handling any kind of network disturbance—interruptions, hiccups, temporary disconnections, you name it—than its ChromeOS counterpart.

We’ve spent countless hours “troubleshooting” issues with NWEA support between the Winter 2024–2025 and Spring 2024–2025 periods, but the word troubleshooting is doing some heavy lifting here. While every person who has assisted us by phone has been polite, professional, and willing to help, it’s clear that NWEA lacks the systems and tools necessary to effectively support large schools facing frequent technical issues. There is no effective way to resolve or even accurately diagnose problems—only individual workarounds and speculative suggestions based on assumed root causes. This feedback relates to case #03105961. Though we’ve provided extensive input over the phone, we’re unsure whether your internal documentation process will actually help the relevant teams take action on our findings, or if everything will simply be archived as “resolved” when it very clearly isn’t.

This is the only channel we were directed to for feedback, so consider this the short version. You’re welcome to contact us for more details; you already have the case number (#03105961).

1. As stated above, the app struggles significantly when facing even minor network issues, often becoming stuck if something doesn’t go right on the (apparently) first try. In our experience, this does not happen on other devices like Chromebooks. We strongly believe the app should be able to self-recover or retry automatically if it encounters difficulties—for example, when attempting to retrieve the next question.

2. Even the senior or highest-tier technical escalation team lacks the tools to effectively diagnose or narrow down issues affecting multiple campuses with tens or hundreds of students: no remote logs, no local diagnostic files, no in-app tools for analysis, no debugging options, no third-party diagnostic app recommendations, nothing. In short, the software and its support framework offer no means to catch, diagnose, debug, or fix underlying problems—only symptomatic remediation for isolated incidents. This is, in our view, unacceptable.

These two fundamental issues make the software a sub-par option and render troubleshooting virtually impossible when things go wrong. We expect better, and overall, the experience has been quite disappointing.