Teresa Meredith felt good when her daughter walked out the door Monday morning for the first day of ISTEP testing. After all, the third-grader had aced the math portion just months ago.

But her daughter, Sarah, and thousands of other Indiana schoolchildren ran up against a test much harder than any they had seen before, and no one told them they could still pass even if they didn’t answer all the questions.

“She was not intimidated at all going in Monday morning,” said Meredith, an elementary school teacher. “When she came home, she was in tears because she couldn’t finish it.”

Sarah wasn’t the only one. As Indiana children take the ISTEP this week — the first time in years it has been given in the spring — they’re finding the new test is a doozy.

Principals, teachers and parents from across the state reported students giving up on the test in frustration, crying themselves to sleep or even calling for a ride home when they became physically ill from stress.

The state officials who oversee the test admit it is more difficult this spring. That doesn’t mean students will fail, though; the state hasn’t set the scores required to pass. Called the cut scores, they could be set lower than on the easier tests of the past.

Plus, students are doing harder, show-your-work math problems first thing, possibly leading some to think they are doing poorly. The multiple-choice sections that might build their confidence come later. The test also has fewer questions, and that means fewer easy ones.

Finally, for the first time, students are faced with questions that require two or three steps to get several answers, each for credit.

The state doesn’t plan to change the test format but will work to make sure students and teachers are better prepared next year, said Wes Bruce, who oversees testing for the Indiana Department of Education.

ISTEP results are expected to be released in August. The annual exam is given to students in Grades 3-8 in an effort to find out which children might need extra help. It also is used to gauge whether schools are making expected progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Vicki Snyder, an Evansville principal and State Board of Education member, said numerous school counselors and others have told her that students struggled with the test this year.

“I have heard some students started crying or just closed their test books,” Snyder told Bruce on Wednesday. “So you’ve got a problem.”

Meredith thinks the changes would have been fine if the state had done a better job of letting teachers and parents know to prepare their students for a harder exam.

Instead, it has fallen to schools and parents to deal with the frustration of students used to doing well on tests.

A principal in Fishers, Shari Switzer, sent a note to parents saying she had found her third-grade son crying in bed Tuesday night because he thought he had done poorly.

“I do know that our math teachers were reporting that yesterday’s testing was quite difficult — much more so than the fall testing,” she wrote to parents. "All I can tell you is to tell your children what I am telling my own: ‘Do your very best work, each day. That is all anyone can ask of you!’ "

That’s the advice the state has for students, too: Don’t worry yet, because you probably will end up doing better than you think, and just do your best.

“When we do the scoring and the cut-score setting,” Bruce said, “we’ll be fair to the students.”