In partnership with international education providers Webexaminer FASTCAT is used within online-schools across the US and internationally. It has established itself as the strategic e-assessment tool of choice by leading organisations of online schooling programs.

Webexaminer provides both turnkey and fully tailored e-assessment solutions to online schools from content authoring and item banking to assessment delivery and test hosting.

Our flagship product is a turnkey solution, an e-assessment suite named FASTCAT - a Fast, Accurate, Secure, Trusted Computer Adaptive Test solution to student assessment, placement and growth measurement. FASTCAT allows educators to develop and administer online tests, get immediate results, receive data driven recommendations, monitor and track academic gains over time.

The FASTCAT e-assessment software suite includes:

Content Management : Intuitive content Authoring System

Item Bank : Comprehensive Item Banking System

School Administration: Student Registration and General School Administration

Assessment Delivery : Secure Web based test delivery

Assessment Reporting : Test results, student analysis, charts (percentile, performance)

Printable Downloads : Export Tests and Items to printable formats e.g. RTF

FASTCAT: Features

• Create new schools and register new students online

• Create new schools and register new students via web services

• Access school data, student data, test data and result data at any time

• Administer tests online

• Flexible publishing of tests to schools and students

• Accumulate item statistics

• Manage your Item Bank

  • Import your own items

  • Create items using FASTCAT Content Authoring

  • Import item banks from commercial item banks

  • Create and review item banks

  • Share/Export items with others

  • Using your expertise align items to standards

• View reports online immediately a test is completed

• Search database for results

• Analyze aggregate and disaggregate data

• Analyze student strengths and weaknesses

• Analyze percentile

• Identify At-Risk

How FASTCAT Works

Create Strands and Items

• Self-create test strands and sub-strands (e.g. Math, Pre-Algebra)

• Self-create items or import items from commercial item bank(s)

• All Items stored in a centralized database

Design Assessments and Build Tests

Create assignments, either real tests or practice tests (e.g. mocks or past paper exams). Answer explanations can be added to each question and optionally made available to the student to view during any test configured to run in practice mode.

• Create Test Template (Test meta-data)

• Add individual strands to template

• Define number of items to be pulled from individual strands

• Auto-Create Test using FASTCAT Test Auto-Generator

• Review Test – if necessary Add, Drop, Re-order Items

Deliver Assessments to Schools and Students

• Quick and intuitive online delivery methods

• Selectively publish tests to targeted schools or all schools

• Publish test to individual students within schools, or groups of students

Taking a test.

Customers can either adopt a policy whereby students login at the Webexaminer test centre. Alternatively a customer can choose for login to originate on the customer web site. Students and schools can be registered with us using web services or by using the registration interfaces provided within the FASTCAT administration GUI.

Students will be asked to provide a user name and password that will have been published to them prior either by email or via your test administrator.

• Students are authenticated and authorized. Security measures to confirm that a user requesting a test is actually a registered student of that school.

• If any kind of server connection failure occurs the exam will be restarted from the point at which the connection was broken the next time the applicant logs in.

• How often a student sits a test is controlled by your exam administrators and is configurable for each test.

Test Duration.

Optionally any test whether is be classical or adaptive can be configured with time constraints both the time allowed for each question and time allowed for overall exam. IRT tests can also be configured with test duration parameter as a constraint, but being IRT the number of items will vary and therefore also the duration of the test. With an adaptive test, if a student's ability level is significantly different from their peer age group level the test may take longer with the need to present more items across more levels of difficulty.

Reporting

Levels of reports range from student's performance to percentile ranking to school-per-school performance. Reports are designed according to role with individual teachers, administrators, students, and parents receiving reports tailored to needs.

For school administrators a detailed report shows data driven recommendations and proficiency ratings. Fine grained performance by strand helps teachers get data to help create learning groups. For wider administrators the percentile report shows ranking within the students peer (age) group and at-risk students. Per-school performance charts comparing to average helps identify schools in need of help. Parents receive a coarse gained report containing score.

As to whether or not the students see their score is controlled by an administrator switch. If students are permitted to see their score they get sight online upon completion of the test or alternatively automatically emailed or both.

Certificates

Auto generated certificates are available and can be requested by students. Certificates are issued once upon authorization by administrators.

Real-time Reports

Reports are published online instantly the test is completed to allow immediate decision-making.

Depending on the user's level of access, the following reports are available:

Student Assessment

High level summary of the student’s performance. Includes a data driven recommendation and a proficiency rating.

Student Percentile

Percentile ranking within peer group. Includes at a glance bar chart. Identifies those students at-risk

Strand Analysis

A breakdown of the student’s scores per strand.

Questions/Answers

Clearly presented this report shows each answer the student gave alongside the correct answer. Colour coded for quick reference and ease of use.

Speed Analysis

Analysis of the average time spent on each item and in comparison to peer group. Also includes overall exam time and number of breaks taken.

Gains

Student gains measurement over period of time and across tests.

Historical Reports

Historical results for any student can be found extremely quickly using the online search engine. The search engine offers the ability to find a student’s test result by various criteria for example student unique id, exam name, username, contact email, date/time.

FASTCAT Issue Tracking

The FASTCAT system includes a web-based general-purpose tracker tool, allowing school administrators to report any issue. Once raised the issue is immediately assigned to a member of the Webexaminer support team. The support team will investigate and provide feedback. Tracker features include:

• Powerful searching

• User-configurable email notifications of issues

• Full change history of each issue

• Dependency tracking and graphing

• Attachment Management (e.g. adding screen shots)

• Fully security-audited

• RDBMS back-end