Achille Parmentier
October 6, 2020
Selecting the right group of experts to author and review content for your high-profile testing program, whatever the subject area, is intrinsic to the success and efficiency of your item writing process. You want a team you can trust, and that’s producing the highest-quality items that provide a good return on investment.
Surpass and Lineup have been working in collaboration to explore the additional benefits that can be gained from using the two platforms in combination with each other, connecting the data via APIs to capture the most comprehensive and useful information about your SME performance.
Lineup and Surpass both work hard to provide the best tools for efficiently organizing and managing the item writing activities, but are dedicated to different parts of that process. While Lineup provides an effective way to curate diverse groups of SMEs for item writing workshops, Surpass contains the tools to author, deliver and report on the content that those writers are tasked with creating.
By seamlessly integrating the data from both solutions, you can benefit from truly data-rich SME management, and make the most informed decisions when selecting the right SMEs and organizing your item writing workshops.
Lineup gives you the ability to build a comprehensive database of experts, providing a quick and effective way to select SMEs based on location, skills and expertise. With a full record of each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, you can be confident you’re bringing together a diverse team, to create the best quality items for your testing program.
Working together, Surpass and Lineup identified that to get a true picture of SME performance, item level data following the creation and delivery of tests, could add significant value, and help users hone the quality of item writing teams even further. Let’s explore how Surpass and Lineup can provide a seamless, integrated process.
Once a team has been selected using the Lineup platform, the innovative Task Management functionality in Surpass can be utilized to assign them quotas of items to write, and monitor their progress throughout the task. Not only does this set clear expectations of the team in terms of what to produce and to what deadlines, Surpass access controls mean your writers only see what they need to, therefore limiting the exposure of the item bank. This type of functionality is particularly suited to remote workshops, something many organizations have had to make a forced move too in recent times.
As well as assisting with the authoring workload, Surpass streamlines the item review process with a simple voting system, so program leaders can easily identify which items need work, and which can be finalized. You can even track all edits and compare versions of items, so you’re in control of all changes that get made.
As items are then taken in live tests, data is gathered on how that item is performing which feeds through to the Surpass reporting screens. You can view data such as P values, how high and low scoring candidates are performing on individual items, and much more. Surpass can provide all the item-level data to give you the confidence that the items produced are behaving as expected, and therefore maintaining the integrity of your testing program.
By then taking that data and feeding it back into the Lineup database, you can add an extra level of information to your SME records to get an all-round view of their work. Are they producing items that consistently perform well and as expected, or have they needed work? Have the items they produced made it into the final tests, or weren’t they good enough? By working together to make the most of the data in both the Lineup and Surpass platforms, we can close the loop in the item writing process, and build up a clear picture of SME performance, helping you to consistently pick the best team and better manage your item writing process.
