Online examination marking technology from NSW has been chosen by Civica to fulfil a significant multi-million pounds sterling global online marking contract.

Civica, a UK-based leader in software, technology and business process services, will manage the use of MarkManager for online marking of a leading skills proficiency test sat by over one million candidates per year.

Developed by the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES) and commercialised with the assistance of technology partner LANSA Pty Ltd, MarkManager delivers best practice marking.

Lee Burley, Managing Director Education, Civica UK Limited, said “The BOSTES MarkManager has a proven long term record of delivering exam results on time and is widely recognised as a ‘new generation’ market leader in its field.”

“We selected MarkManager for a number of reasons, including its support for a model of frequent test sittings throughout the year in a controlled environment. We have found that BOSTES has excellent domain knowledge and is responsive to our special requirements.”

Civica is an ideal UK-based partner for BOSTES because of its strong presence in education, its excellent track record of reliability and its experience gained from supplying software and services to over 6,000 schools, colleges and libraries around the world. Civica with an annual revenue of over £220 million has sufficient scale and availability of resources to fulfil the large contracts that increasingly MarkManager is being considered for.

Civica will provide MarkManager to its clients on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis.

BOSTES President Tom Alegounarias said “In NSW BOSTES uses MarkManager for its internationally recognised Higher School Certificate (HSC) examinations.

“For the 2014 HSC of nearly 5000 markers, around 2000 marked online. Together the markers marked over two million writing booklets completed by nearly 77,000 students across 116 courses.

“In 2014 the first exam was on Monday 13 October. The last exam was on Thursday 5 November. Marking ended at 9pm on Wednesday 26 November, and results were released at 6am on Wednesday 17 December.

“MarkManager is a great innovation which facilitated BOSTES meeting this tight timeframe” Mr Alegounarias said.

MarkManager provides senior markers – who supervise teams of markers – with a number of sophisticated quality assurance tools not available in pen-and-paper marking.  Any errors can be detected and corrected immediately, saving significant time and improving the marking process. Examination responses are distributed randomly and anonymously, and markers can review their marks at any time.

Furthermore, senior markers are able to supervise their teams of markers in real time – this is a level of quality assurance not available with pen-and-paper marking, and the application immediately stops markers, who do not adhere to the marking guidelines, from marking.

MEDIA: BOSTES - Michael Charlton 0477 362 546
Civica - Daryn Vanstone 0475 964 762

About Civica

Civica generates revenues of £220 million per annum.

Every day Civica’s products and services help more than 1 million professionals in their jobs, streamlining service delivery to more than 80 million citizens and businesses. Civica is delivering to:

• 1,000 local organisations
• 6,000 schools, colleges and libraries
• 400 health and care providers
• 200 social housing organisations
• 75% of the UK’s blue-light services.

Civica’s systems are used to manage:

• £90 billion of funds or expenditure
• £1.5 billion in secure electronic payments
• 2 million properties
• Access to day-to-day applications for 1 million students
• Vehicle fleets totalling more than 250,000 vehicles
• 200 million library loans
• Pension schemes with a total of over 600,000 members.

About LANSA

LANSA is a leading provider of software tools for rapid application development, application modernisation and transformation, and enterprise integration. Using LANSA's powerful cross-platform tools, organisations overcome the complexity inherent in creating and maintaining business applications. The complete suite of LANSA’s integrated tools is also the technology foundation for a wide range of business solutions from LANSA and over 300 business partners. One of those solutions is MarkManager from BOSTES.

LANSA has worked closely with BOSTES on the commercialisation of MarkManager and its representation in the global educational assessment market. Established in 1987, LANSA supports thousands of companies around the world with its products and services.

About BOSTES

The Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards NSW (BOSTES) is responsible for school curriculum, assessment, and teaching and regulatory standards in NSW schools.

Our key responsibilities relate to:

• development of the curriculum for Kindergarten to Year 12
• accreditation of teachers
• development and conduct of the Higher School Certificate and the Record of School Achievement programs
• registration and accreditation of schools
• administration of the NAPLAN tests.