Pacific Metrics Corporation

MONTEREY, CA, February 15, 2010—Pacific Metrics Corporation, a leading provider of online assessment solutions, announced today the launch of its TruScore™ automated scoring system for student responses to open-ended test questions.
Pacific Metrics’ TruScore™ system automatically scores essays and responses to short-answer mathematics and science questions.

• The innovative scoring system for essays is based on Education Northwest’s 6+1 Trait® Writing framework. TruScore can score essays for all six traits or be customized to score according to state or district rubrics. The system for essays can provide students who work online with immediate instructional feedback on their writing abilities.
• TruScore also scores responses to short-answer, constructed-response mathematics and science test items based on customized scoring rubrics. As with essay scoring, the TruScore application for short answers is capable of producing immediate scores for students and teachers.

“The ability to automatically score short constructed responses represents a breakthrough technology,” said Pacific Metrics’ CEO, Dr. Howard C. Mitzel.

Studies of system accuracy based on hundreds of thousands of student responses have shown that TruScore is as accurate as a human reader with reliabilities above industry standards for hand scoring.

TruScore is currently used in both formative and high-stakes testing environments, providing fast results with significant cost efficiencies over traditional hand scoring. The system can be used alone, combined with professional hand-scoring services, or combined with teacher-based scoring to provide faster and more accurate turnaround of assessment data.

The system can easily integrate with testing platforms and be configured to score the wide variety of test items used in state-level and classroom assessments. Setting up the system requires a pre-scored sample of student responses. The system then emulates human scoring and scores more consistently than human raters. TruScore can also be combined with human scoring to monitor scores and produce more accurate results.

“TruScore is a highly refined automated-response system that was created by our team of veteran assessment experts and researchers,” added Mitzel. “It’s the assessment scoring technology of the future—available to our clients today.”

About Pacific Metrics

Pacific Metrics Corporation creates lasting improvements to the assessment and learning environment through the thoughtful use of technology. Headquartered in Monterey, California, Pacific Metrics provides specialized psychometric software and sophisticated online systems to state departments of education and to organizations that develop, administer, and score large-scale and small-scale assessments. The company has achieved recognition for its technical work and for being a leading force in the development of innovative, customized, web-based systems. For more information, visit www.pacificmetrics.com.