Selected-Response Scoring

PEMSolutions offers the largest capacity in the industry for scoring student assessments. Our facilities are designed for maximum operating efficiency to provide an uninterrupted flow of high-volume data processing, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each year our services scan nearly 600 million sheets for paper-based assessments, scoring nearly 40 million multiple choice tests annually.

Performance-Based Scoring

Performance-based test items can help your assessment program measure students’ achievement in areas of critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication—skills that can be the most difficult to measure in a large-scale testing format. PEMSolutions can help you score performance items in a wide variety of subject areas, using dependable trained scorers and the infrastructure to score millions of responses accurately.

Automated Essay Scoring

PEMSolutions utilizes the Knowledge Analysis Technologies™ (KAT) engine from the Knowledge Technologies group of Pearson. The KAT engine evaluates the meaning of text by examining whole written passages. The state-of-the-art KAT engine is grounded in solid, published academic research and real world use.

The KAT engine is based on unique implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an approach that generates semantic similarity of words and passages by analyzing large bodies of relevant text. LSA can then "understand" the meaning of text much the same as a human reader. The KAT engine includes built-in detectors for off-topic responses and other special situations that may need to be referred to human readers.