Reduce Costs and Improve Student Outcomes through ExamSoft Assessment

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Throughout the years, educational institutions have struggled to improve with reduced budgets. Always asked to do more with less, it’s abundantly clear that programs and educators need help. Thankfully, there is a solution—a technological solution. Institutions can look to optimize their assessment processes, reduce the workloads for their instructors, and save on costs by adopting ExamSoft solutions.

Achieving Programmatic Efficiency

Strict financial budgets make it difficult for institutions to obtain programmatic efficiency and optimization. They simply can’t afford to spend extra money on more staff, classrooms, and administrators. It’s recommended that colleges and higher education institutions reduce costs by leveraging technology that creates new models of operation and bolsters learning infrastructure. ExamSoft has helped many programs remodel their assessment processes by simplifying the way these programs manage assessment with a one-stop platform for item banking and exam creation, delivery, and reporting. By using an assessment tool with exam item mapping, educators will have to spend less time on building, delivering, and grading assessments and will be able to spend more time on teaching and supporting students.

Cost Saving with Computer-Based Testing

There is no question that cost saving is a tremendous challenge for educational institutions, but it’s not an impossible task. One way programs can save money is to adopt a computer-based testing platform. In fact, Richard E. Murphy from Tufts University School of Medicine once calculated that paper printing for only one cohort of 30 students over a 25-month period cost $4,217–and the expenses pile up exponentially when measured campus wide. It’s important to also note that this cost didn’t include time and salary expenses that were saved due to decreased time faculty had to spend preparing, printing, and grading exams by hand.

ExamSoft’s embedded-assessment platform gives educational programs the power to deliver exams electronically on a variety of devices, including Macs, PCs, iPads, and Surface Pros. ExamSoft provides cost savings from traditional assessment methods that helps to ease the burden of budgetary constraints.

Student Retention and Remediation Opportunities

You would be hard pressed to find an educational program that doesn’t hold student remediation and retention at the top of its list of priorities, but the big question is how do schools on a strapped budget continue to improve student learning? The National Center for Academic Transformation suggests that higher education institutions use information technology and continued assessment to provide students with quality feedback and individualized support.

The results of this kind of system can be seen in at Northwestern Oklahoma State School of Nursing wherein, using ExamSoft’s embedded-assessment platform, it leveraged detailed reporting capabilities to quickly identify and remediate at-risk students and effectively increase passage rates from 72 percent to 92 percent. While remediating students was nothing new for the school’s faculty, the quality and depth of the student feedback, as well as the time spent in preparing reports, improved drastically.

Information technology remains one of the best solutions to improving the quality of education while reducing costs for institutions facing decreased funding and impending budget cuts. Contact ExamSoft to learn more about how an all-encompassing assessment solution can help your educational programs and institution.