ACCUPLACER and the community college.

Community colleges are faced with a unique set of challenges in education. Many of the students coming to campus are non-traditional students who, because of job or family commitments, may not be able to fit into the stringent time frames associated with the typical standardized test.

Furthermore, many of these tests are geared toward a specific set of abilities, and are not easily adapted to the diverse populations now attending college today.

ACCUPLACER can tackle both of those buildings in a single bound -- flexible enough to be used for assessment anytime, yet comprehensive enough to meet the needs of all the students who make up a campus.

Everyone who has ever taken a test knows the frustration that's involved, even when you take away the intimidation factor of having to get a good grade.

A common nightmare is missing the start of a test because of oversleeping, and thinking it won't be offered again until the start of the next decade. Because ACCUPLACER is delivered via the Internet, its tests are available anytime, day or night.

But that relieves just one of the testing nightmares encountered. The other is having to grapple with a question that is so hard it might as well be about advanced quantum mechanics, or a question that is so easy it puts you to sleep before you can move on.

As a computer adaptive test, ACCUPLACER ensures that all the questions presented are appropriate and tailored to that student's ability.

Several exciting new components have been added to the original tests that comprise ACCUPLACER. WritePlacer Plus, the electronic essay scoring arm of the College Board's ACCUPLACER System, is the only program available to assess student placement essays within an comprehensive assessment and placement system. WritePlacer Plus is based on the Intellimetric platform and uses an approach called "modeling."

In this strategy the computer, through the Intellimetric program, literally models the way in which expert human readers score essays on a specific topic.

Because of the computer's "machine-like" precision and objectivity, it is able to significantly outperform expert readers in multiple reliability studies, all the while doing the scoring in about 10 seconds.

The computer does not get hungry, thirsty, tired or distracted. It grades an essay exactly the same way at midnight as at 5 a.m. All of those distinctly human characteristics that expert readers try to minimize are not a factor in computer scoring.

An expansion of this innovative program is WritePlacer ESL -- this version's prompts were specifically designed for students who study English as a second language, and the modeling of the program was done with essays written by ESL students.

One of the newest features of ACCUPLACER expands the ability of a school to reach an even greater segment of its non-native speaking population.

Often a college is faced with a situation where a student's barrier to success is as basic as the ability to understand what is heard on a day-to-day basis. Other tests have attempted to help a school identify this concern, but their test design has not been able to accomplish this challenge effectively.

ACCUPLACER's listening test solves this problem in a way no other test on the market has -- it allows a student to listen to every part of the test. The student has the ability not only to listen to the passage, but also to the question, as well as each answer option. The student also can have each section repeated a certain number of times.

ACCUPLACER long has held the premier position among testing and placement systems, but these additions make it truly the most comprehensive system in the market today.

Geared toward a community that is diverse and requires flexibility, ACCUPLACER has continually responded to the needs of community colleges, their students and faculty, and will continue to do so in the future.

The College Board is a national, nonprofit membership association dedicated to preparing, inspiring, and connecting students to college and opportunity.