• ClearLearning's focus is online assessment. Test Pilot was developed at Purdue University with over 80 combined years of distance education experience in the development team.
  
  
• Test Pilot is time tested. First released in 1998, Test Pilot is continually being refined at the suggestions of our customers. The feature set has been designed to meet the real needs of e-learning professionals in a wide variety of environments.
  
  
• Test Pilot is platform independent. Since Test Pilot can be installed on nearly any personal computer or web server, it can scale to meet any assessment need. You're not tied to any one hardware or software manufacturer or operating system. You pick what is right for your organization and Test Pilot will fit in.
  
  
• While Test Pilot's feature far exceeds that our competitors, our pricing is lower and our licensing is perpetual. We don't charge annual or per semester licensing fees for customers who install Test Pilot on their own servers. This makes Test Pilot the most cost effective solution for online assessment available today.
  
  
• Test Pilot fits into any e-learning environment. Since Test Pilot is a web-based software package and accessed with a web browser, it can coexist with any e-learning software. In fact, many of our customers choose to use Test Pilot instead of their learning management system's assessment component since Test Pilot offers far richer capabilities.
  
  
• We've been told, over and over, that our support is first rate; far better than any of our competitors. When you need help, you get it!

Other Options?

The following are actual messages (including our responses in bold) from people interested in replacing their current online assessment software with Test Pilot.

Oddly, Blackboard at times will not be all that helpful for many distance education efforts. The reason is that when campuses license Blackboard, their license may only cover students who are enrolled on that campus. Usually, that's not distance education. This can be a trial for users: if you want to test a population of applicants to a program, survey members of a certain profession, build collaborations with local K-12 schools or other schools in your region, many of the things that the internet makes possible-- you cannot do it with a system license which precludes those people from using the system.

Test Pilot is licensed for use from a single web server by up to a specified number of participants without respect as to their location or status. We keep it simple.

First of all, our college uses Blackboard as their on-line software. We have experienced a few problems with Blackboard testing. We want to make sure that if we purchase Test Pilot, we do not have similar problems. I have listed the problems as follows:

• Once a test is entered into Blackboard and at least one student has taken the test, if anything is changed to the test, including a typo, all test scores vanish. Blackboard has no way of recovery.

  Test Pilot permits any editing with the exception of question deletion while preserving all user response data. If you choose to delete a question, the response data must be flushed. However, you may simply elect to stop using a question without deleting it or erasing any response data.

• Blackboard does not allow for a timing test to cut the student off and give a message that time has expired?

  Test Pilot does provide for an elapsed time counter as well as for warning and automated submission after the timer has expired. All of these options (and they are OPTIONS) require that the student use a Javascript capable broser such as Netscape 2+ or IE 3+.

• If a student misses answering a question, Blackboard goes back to that question informing the student. However, many times the screen freezes and the test data is lost.
  
  
• Students are not allowed to complete part of a test at one time, save it, and go back to it later.
  
  
• Sometimes the screen freezes and all data is lost, for no apparent reason. It happen 3 times last semester.

  When Test Pilot assessments are offered one question at a time or a group of questions at a time, you may OPTIONALLY select to make the assessment resumable. This causes the students' responses to be saved at each transaction with the server. Thus, in the event of a browser crash or loss of Internet connection, the student can resume the assessment from where they left off without loss of information.

• Students are not allowed to leave a blank in a test.

  Test Pilot does not force users to make responses to questions. Of course, questions without response are not awarded any points.

• If a test is designed for a score of 1.67 per question, and the next semester the teacher transfers that test to his new class, the score automatically rounds off to 2.0. Each question has to then be manually changed to 1.67.

  Test Pilot questions must have integer point awards. However, each response to a question can have a different point award. Percentages of the maximum are automatically calculated - thus you are not limited in making question point awards sum to 100 points or any other magic number. Thus, question and response point awards can be weighted in any manner.

Those are the main Blackboard testing problems.

We already knew that Blackboard's product was limited in its capabilities. However, this list of issues is truly disappointing. I now understand why ClearLearning has had so many requests for information from Blackboard customers.

We've actually approached Blackboard to discuss their enhancing their testing capabilities with Test Pilot. However, they seem to believe that what they have is "good enough".

At ClearLearning, we're never satisfied that what we have is good enough! We continually improve upon our products based on our customers' feedback. We are always asking the question, "What we can do better?"

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I'm looking for a testing methodology to support learning programs on my company's intranet (around 400 potential users). In my last company, I bought something called Perception, by a company called QuestionMark. I liked it for its record-keeping system, but its too expensive for my new company, so I'm looking for alternatives.

We've heard your complaint about Question Mark's costs before. Test Pilot's feature set is broader, our license fees are lower and our fees are neither recurring or ongoing as are Perception's. We support many custom record-keeping options and the administrative and infrastructure overhead of Test Pilot is considerably lower than that required by Perception.

We're sure you'll agree with our customers that Test Pilot represents the most cost effective means of accomplishing online evaluation.

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You may have heard about Quia Corporation - a formerly free online testing ASP service. The capabilities of their software parallel those of Test Pilot v1 (circa 1998). Quia may well fit your needs. However, consider that using Test Pilot Hosting at ClearLearning will result in fuller featured online quizzes, surveys and tutorials at a considerably lower cost. The following is from a response by a Quia salesperson in response to a query on their new academic pricing:

Quia's pricing is based on the number of instructors within an organization that will be using it. Our annual pricing is as follows:

$49/instructor for 1-9 instructors
$39/instructor for 10-99 instructors
$29/instructor for 100 or more instructors

Fuller featured hosting with ClearLearning's Test Pilot Hosting Service typically costs $35 per month. Furthermore, Test Pilot can be licensed and installed on your own institution's web server to avoid recurring fees entirely. ClearLearning makes no limits on the number of instructors using Test Pilot on an institution's own server. Thus, if you're already using an online testing service, switching to Test Pilot may well pay for itself.