INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana’s much-maligned standardized student test will likely be hours’ shorter in length when more than 400,000 students take it next year.

State Department of Education projections provided Tuesday to a legislative panel show that the state’s next ISTEP test is expected to take about nine hours. That would make it some three hours shorter than the test given to Indiana students earlier this year.

The ISTEP exam became the focus of outrage from parents and educators in February after test times ballooned to 12 hours. That happened after the test was redesigned to align it with new state standards created after Indiana withdrew from the national Common Core standards last year.

Indiana switched testing companies in March, scrapping vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill in favor of Pearson Education Inc.