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3. What methods of administration, scoring, and reporting do you offer? Which do you recommend?

Vangent provides a great variety of assessment administration, scoring, and reporting tools. While not every assessment is available in every delivery system, the most popular assessments are on every system. To best understand these options, you should clearly separate assessment administration, capture of assessment responses, and assessment scoring. Here's a look at each:

Assessment Administration
An assessment is a series of questions or items to which an examinee responds. We can present these questions and record the responses using several technologies, including:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  
• Internet Web Site
• Windows-based PC Software
• Paper and pencil booklets and answer sheets

These different options all have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the nature of the assessment situation. For example, in a mass-testing situation where you have a large audience in a room, paper and pencil answer sheets make the most sense economically. For examinees taking a prescreening assessment (perhaps from home) an IVR or Internet technologies may work better.

Capture of Assessment Responses
Some technologies capture the examinee's answers as a part of the administration process, while others provide a document containing the answers that need to be further processed. For example, a popular and inexpensive assessment approach uses a paper assessment booklet with answers recorded on a special form. One type of form can be faxed for scoring-yielding an assessment report that's faxed back within a few minutes. Another type of form, typically used in large group settings, is scanned by special optical mark sense equipment to capture the answers. For assessments administered using a telephone or IVR, the keys pressed on a telephone keypad capture the answers just as well as state of the art voice recognition technology embedded in our IVR systems.

Assessment Scoring
The important thing about assessment scoring is that it should be done identically, regardless of how the assessment was administered or how the answers were recorded. Vangent defines its assessment scoring algorithms in a central database, and this scoring is deployed to all of its systems. So a customer could have some locations using IVR assessments, some using Web administered assessments, and others using fax scoring, with the mass hiring situations using scannable forms…and the scoring and reporting will be the same for each location. This provides organizations with the flexibility to optimally map the assessment administration to the various needs of the organization while ensuring that the scoring will remain consistent.

Assessment Reporting
The important thing about assessment reporting is that the results should be made available only on a need-to-know basis. In other words, the report should be treated as a private document. For some organizations, this simply means that the hiring manager will only receive a hiring recommendation, such as Red, Yellow, or Green. However, in other circumstances, the detailed results of the assessment may be needed, such as when an HR manager needs to know individual strengths and weaknesses for the purpose of employee development. Assessment reports are available in varying levels of detail and access security, including printed documents, PDF files, IVR verbal results, and Web page listings. The key in reporting is getting the right information to those who need to know, when they need to know it.