INDIANA – Indiana education officials plan to pay a company $43 million to create, implement, and grade the new test that will replace the traditional ISTEP standardized exams. State officials have approved a three-year contract with the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research. The company will design a new Indiana test named ILEARN, or Indiana’s Learning Evaluation Readiness Network. It’s planned for implementation in the spring of 2019. The current ISTEP exam, which nearly 500,000 students take, has faced years of complaints about the number of days students spend taking the test and months-long waits for exam results from other testing companies. The new test is planned to be given in a shorter testing window. Results are also expected to be released faster. ILEARN will be a computer adaptive test, with questions that change depending on whether a student answers a previous question correctly. State officials said it will assess a student’s abilities better. The tests will be administered completely online to grades three through eight and test students’ abilities in English, Language Arts, and Mathematics.Â