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New additions to the Surpass Assessment Platform are now available. This latest update brings with it a host of new features designed to allow more freedom and variation in the way you create, deliver, and report on the millions of tests taken through Surpass each year.
Read on to discover how you can benefit from just a few of these exciting updates.

New Ways of Awarding Marks

[one-half-first] Two of the most exciting and noticeable changes in the most recent Surpass update are the introduction of automated ‘weighted’ and ‘combination’ marking. Now, you can easily create multiple choice questions and award each answer option its own score for cases where one response is seen as being worth more marks than another, rather than being simply right or wrong. For multiple response questions, combination marking can be applied, where the candidate is awarded a different number of marks depending on the combination of answer options they select.

This means you can now create much more diverse questions that reward candidates for partial knowledge, and the feature also allows to you more accurately see where knowledge gaps may exist, or where levels of understanding may need to be improved.


We have created the short demonstration test below so you can see for yourself how this new scoring method might be used across a range of subjects.
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Combined Marking Question creation


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Combined Marking Question creation part 2


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Weighted Question Type marks


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See how other organisations like yours deliver on-screen tests. Go to our ‘Who We Work With’ page for links to examples and practice papers.


Enhanced Usability

[one-half-first]For some organisations, having hundreds of item authors means that usability and efficiency are essential requirements when it comes to test creation software.
Our dedicated User Experience team are constantly researching to make sure that Surpass remains the most powerful, yet easy to use assessment platform available, and the Spring 2016 release sees a number of small but significant changes as a result of their work.
The most useful of these is the enhanced ‘save’ functionality. Item authors can now ‘Save’ as usual and continue working on a question, ‘Save & Close’ if finished, or ‘Save & New’ – which will automatically save the existing question and open a new, blank question of the same type. Even in early demonstrations, we’ve seen people save a huge amount of time (and frustration) thanks to this new addition, removing the need for extra clicks and loading screens. We’re sure your authors will see a huge benefit when creating a high volume of new questions.
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Candidate Benefits
[one-half-first] The candidate experience is a crucial part of test delivery (after all, without candidates, there would be no test!)
If you’re a Surpass User, you will already know about the huge benefits computer based testing can have over pen and paper, but like us, you’ll also be aware that paper culture still has a big influence on how candidates work in their exams. One small but significant piece of feedback we have now implemented is the ability for candidates to strike-through answer options in multiple choice and multiple response questions that they know to be incorrect.
This simple action helps some candidates to focus by immediately eliminating what they know to be distracting wrong answers, and put their full thought process into choosing the correct option. Like many of the best solutions, it’s a simple idea that could make a big difference.
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The above are just a few of the latest additions to the Surpass Assessment Platform, and we haven’t even mentioned the introduction of numeric tags or improvements to the ‘Raw Data Extract’ (For a sample of raw data from Surpass, please use our contact form to submit a request and we’d be happy to send it to you).
If you’d like to know the full details of the Spring update, existing customers can contact their Account Manager, or if you’re new to Surpass you can get in touch with us today contact us today.