PSU

The broad scope of work included:

• Designing assessments in the areas of Aptitude, General Awareness & 6 engineering domains including Chemical, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics & Telecommunication.
• Creating a large question bank. The size of the question bank was of critical importance as the assessments were to be delivered in multiple sessions. 
• Creating an application portal
• Receiving & collecting hard copies of applications at a Post Office Box number
• Processing applications & screening out non-eligible candidates
• Designing assessments for 12 subjects
• Delivery of test in paper-pencil mode across India
• Result processing

Being a government organization, the shipping firm had many reservations & variations in eligibility norms for certain categories. Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions had to account for all of this. Also, there were multiple filters such as institution background, course background as well as academic eligibility.

Processing applications with such minute details was a huge task. But Aptech completed the entire process & published the final list of eligible candidates utilizing less than 85% of time allocated. This created extra time for sending test-related information to candidates, thus improving efficiency.

Designing the test was the next challenge. The objective of the assessments was to filter out around 99.8% of candidates. The areas of assessments included conventional subjects like management & engineering as also less conventional ones such as naval architecture. As per the Government of India rules, the question papers had to be bilingual.

Keeping these parameters in mind, Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions focused on the following:

• A panel of Subject Matter Experts (SME) was put together & a Principal Test Coordinator was appointed.
• The team arrived at a test blueprint conforming to assessment objectives. Once this blueprint was approved by the customer, items were carefully crafted & administered to a sample base of candidates and validated accordingly.
• A random mix of items was chosen to constitute the final paper.
• The entire process was conducted in a highly secure environment & none of the SME had any peer-level communication.
• Once finalized, papers were translated into Hindi under the guidance of Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions language experts.
• Finally, the ‘ready-to-administer’ question paper was printed under 24x7 surveillance at two separate locations to ensure minimal possibility of leakage. The pages were assembled by Aptech employees following strict security measures.
• Using the services of a dedicated logistics partner, Aptech shipped the printed papers to Authorized Education Partners of Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions across multiple locations in India, covering all the cities where the test was to be administered. At each location, the authorized Test Administrator took custody of the papers. Besides, Aptech had arranged strict warehouse security to ensure zero tampering of the papers at any stage. The papers were opened only in the presence of authorized representatives of the customer.

• After the test was conducted, the next critical step was reverse logistics. Answer sheets were shipped to the central processing hub through dedicated logistics partner of Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions. They ensured that all unused question papers & answer sheets were brought back as any spillage of information would have counted as a security breach.
• Back at the central processing hub, the answer sheets were scanned through an Optical Mark Reader & candidate responses were mapped & put together in a database. Aptech Assessment & Testing Solutions transferred this raw data into score format & handed it over to the customer well before the defined time.