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.

For more information, contact:
Michael Charlton
Director, Media
michael.charlton@bostes.nsw.edu.au
(02) 9367 8248