The Department of Education has canceled its three-year $9.6 million contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill in the wake of the numerous problems associated with the electronic scoring of Regents exams last spring.

Under that contract, the city sent the essay portion of the Regents exams to McGraw-Hill employees in Connecticut, who scanned them into the company system before sending them to teachers at 20 citywide testing centers to download and score. The names of students and schools were concealed; the system was designed in response to the State Education Department’s new requirement that teachers not score their own students’ exams.

The scanning went much slower than expected, so teachers sent to testing centers — often far from their schools — soon ran out of exams to score and were sent back to their schools. Many of the scans were blurry and unreadable. In the most egregious case, the exams for English language arts completed by students at Chelsea Career and Technical HS went missing, and students had to take the test over again.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew had excoriated the city for outsourcing the scoring to a private company. Union representatives visited testing sites and held a press conference calling for the DOE to make changes.

City education officials said the 2014 Regents exams will be scored the traditional way, by teachers at scoring sites throughout the city using pencil and paper.

UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools Janella Hinds said the electronic scoring process had been a fiasco.

“The process was not explained well or organized properly,” she said. “Students were in danger of not graduating because of delays.”

Anthony Klug, who was a history teacher at Wadleigh HS in Harlem for nine years, said he was left without work to do for most of the day at the scoring center that he was sent to.

“It was a stark contrast to traditional grading of our students in our own schools, which gave us time to consult with colleagues,” said Klug, who is now a special representative to Hinds. The new process “took the art and professionalism out of the process of grading students,” he said.

In a joint email to high school teachers sent on Sept. 17, Hinds and Sterling Roberson, the UFT vice president for career and technical high schools, thanked the teachers for alerting the union to the flaws in the new system.

“It was your vigilance that equipped the union with the information we needed to demand changes,” they said.