ACCUPLACER, IntelliMetric , Criterion, Intelligent Essay Assessor

ACCUPLACER

ACCUPLACER is a product marketed by the College Board for use in placing student in writing courses and other courses. The promotional information from the ACCUPLACER website claims that “The College Board's ACCUPLACER program is the only computer adaptive placement test delivered over the Internet to give you accurate course placement in any location.”

Additionally, “The computer-adaptive capability of ACCUPLACER allows you to test

students more accurately, with fewer questions in less time, and with

immediate results.”

In addition, ACCUPLACER is offered as a panacea: it will make the whole campus unit one big happy family:

ACCUPLACER appeals to all members of your campus family.

• Students find it less stressful and time-consuming, more accurate and immediate.

• Faculty have more options, and find it more reliable, valid, and accurate.

• Test administrators need ACCUPLACER because it is easy to use, accurate,

• reliable, and valid.

• Institutional researchers appreciate the easy access to student and performance data.

IntelliMetric

IntelliMetric is scoring technology developed by Vantage Learning . Web-based promotional materials promote Intellimetric as an “Award-winning open-ended response scoring technology proven to be more accurate, consistent, and reliable than expert human scorers!”

IntelliMetric is powered by CogniSearch and Quantum Reasoning technologies, but only Vantage technologies knows what's inside those technologies. Testing the claims made about these programs is impossible because Vantage considers the algorithms proprietary. In a recent industry book on machine scoring the references page of the article written by Scott Elliot of Vantage included 15 references, 14 of which were to Vantage's own research (86). A page of web-based information on IntelliMetric is available at http://www.vantagelearning.com/product_pages/full-learningaccess.html .

IntelliMetric technology is the scoring engine that powers ACCUPLACER, My ACCESS! , and several other scoring machines.

You can take your own ride on the IntelliMetric by going to http://www.vantage.com/demosite/demo.html

Criterion

Criterion is a machine scoring product created by ETS, powered by technology called E-rater , developed in-house by ETS. Criterion is marketed as a Web-based service designed to evaluate a student's writing skill by providing instant score reporting and diagnostic feedback to both the instructor and student.

According to the Criterion website , the technology is used in colleges and universities for the following purposes:

“Criterion supports community colleges and four-year colleges and universities with a reliable evaluation of student writing ability, and an easy way to administer and score the essay portion of an institution's placement tests, basic skills classes exit tests, or other writing assessments. It's also an effective remediation tool that can be proactively implemented to fill an institutional gap identified during the accreditation process.”

Intelligent Essay Assessor

The Intelligent Essay Assessor , the program that proudly asserts that meaning is a matter of word + word + word has not responded to requests for numbers. Their website introduces the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA) as “a proprietary web-based service developed at Knowledge Assessment Technologies (KAT) that automatically evaluates a student's writing skills and knowledge, and provides scoring and diagnostic feedback to both the instructor and student.” The IEA uses Latent Semantic Analysis which is (according to KAT) is the “industry leading language processing technology to provide writers with instant score and writing analysis feedback on writing samples they enter and submit.”

The IEA “offers students an opportunity to not only get a score but to improve reading and writing skills through instant pedagogical feedback”

Knowledge Assessment Technologies, now part of Pearson Knowledge Technologies, not only markets the IEA, but has incorporate its technology in several other programs including Summary Street which provides feedback on student summaries, and other products including Standards Seeker, Knowledge Post, SuperManual, Career Map, and A2D (Auto-auto-didact). A demo of how the technology works is available at http://pearsonkt.com/cgi-bin/prenhall/phMenu.cgi?rubric=6&demo=1 .

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