“Everybody here, at some point in their career, will take exams,” explains NPPD Information Technology and Telecommunications Analyst Tim Pospisil. “Our nuclear facility, with 800 employees, is our heaviest user of assessments. The people who work there are required to take multiple exams yearly along with other qualifications, so we needed a best-in-class examination system that would give us one place to manage all our questions and exams.”

NPPD considered many issues in selecting Perception to manage assessments. One goal was to make it easier for instructors and subject matter experts to create and manage questions. Simple browser-based authoring tools were among the capabilities that drew NPPD to Questionmark Perception. The wide variety of question types available in Perception was another plus: instructors appreciate the ability to create math questions and are incorporating multimedia files into some assessments.

“Our previous system limited us to multiple choice, true/false, and yes/no question types,” explains Pospisil. “Now that we have more than 20 different question types to work with, we’re able to challenge our students in new ways.”

Security was another major consideration: NPPD valued options such as requiring a proctor to log in before a participant, and using Questionmark Secure to lock down participants’ desktops and prevent task switching during high-stakes exams.

Perception has enabled NPPD to bring together all of NPPD’s exam question banks from multiple locations, in numerous formats, and manage them all in one place. For classroom exams that still must be delivered on paper, Questionmark’s printing and scanning solution makes it possible to upload participants’ scanned responses into Perception for scoring and reporting.

“We’ve been able to eliminate a lot of the paper processing we had to do with exams and materials,” comments Pospisil. “Perception has also given us efficient ways to record and store test results for long periods of time, in keeping with state requirements.”Perception’s ability to run course evaluations has helped NPPD save costs by retiring a third-party system that was previously used for surveys.

“We’ve been able to give our students the one-stop shop that we’d hoped for, including the ability to review all of their qualification data in one system and from one place, and this includes everything at our nuclear facility,” remarks Pospisil. “We’re really happy about that and our students are very grateful for that. For the future, we’re looking into the ability to deliver exams in a mobile format. We have technicians that are out in the field who don’t necessarily get to a computer every day, but we’d still like them to be able

to access training material and do assessments from a mobile environment. We’re also looking to use Questionmark Live browser-based authoring a lot more and implement some new capabilities in the SAP Learning Solution too.”