Take a minute to watch this great video and join us in doing the gratitude dance.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

• Ability to configure custom branding for Scoring and Performance Reports
  • Customers can now upload their logo, choose a color scheme, and create their own custom branded reports. This feature will be accessible to customers by request only.
• “Section Reports” (Mini Reports) for ACT and SAT tests
  • We incorporated a number of backend changes in the Scoring and Performance Reporting module. This will allow us to roll out “Mini Reports” in near future. Now, if a student practices only a single section of an ACT or SAT test, they can generate a “mini report” with the same level of detail and insight as our full report; we even provide a projected scaled score.
    • For example, an ACT test student can practice only the science section, and will be able to generate detailed scoring and performance analysis report for just that section. Stay tuned for more details on this in a future post, or contact us if you’d like to be an early adopter.
• Coming Soon: Additional tests for SAT and ACT
  • Soon we will be announcing support for released/retired ACT and SAT published tests (not in the books), as well as support for custom tests. Due to many customer requests, we’re attempting to support as many of the released SAT and ACT tests as we can. Let us know if you’re interested in being notified when these get released, or if there are specific test versions you’re seeking.

As always we have tested as much as possible, but there is always a possibility that you may encounter issues. If you see something that needs our attention please reach out to us.

Team Socrato

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

Students and tutors who use traditional books, paper / pencil to practice and prepare for the ACT exam can now get the best of two worlds. Work with traditional printed books like Real ACT Test Prep Guide to practice and fill out the bubble sheets on paper; and use Socrato’s ACT Diagnostic Assessment Service to create the best ACT diagnostic analysis.

After paper based practice, in a few clicks tutors or students can enter student test practice responses (bubble sheet data) into Socrato using one of our convenient data entry options: directly enter as bubble sheet (student or tutor), enter in bulk mode, or load files automatically generated via a bubble sheet scanner.

Once done, within seconds the Socrato online service does the grading, scaling, scoring and detailed analysis. This service takes our previous work on our Free ACT test analysis and scoring tool further. It removes all complexities of ACT test scoring, ACT composite score calculation etc. The automatically generated reports can be printed, emailed or viewed online. The ACT report is now on par with our highly regarded SAT diagnostic service.

The diagnostic analysis is one of the best. It covers:

• Full history of student progress, detailed grading, scoring, scaling, and even the point cost analysis in each subject area
• Skills, difficulty level, subject area content analysis, and question responses detail
• Socrato analysis goes “beyond scores” and analyzes student test taking tendencies and behavior

This analysis leads to personalized, concrete recommendations, and performance improvement in less time. You can download the sample diagnostic report for the ACT test for an Individual student here.

Tutors can look online or download detailed diagnostic reports for an individual student to help them one-on-one, or look at a class/group as a whole to optimize the strategy and instruction plan for the most optimal outcome. The entire process is very similar to Socrato’s SAT, MCAS, and other exam assessment offerings. To see how Socrato generates one of the best diagnostic assessments for the ACT, SAT and other tests see the video here.

By combining the best of two – paper / pencil for practice, and computers to do the analysis, Socrato saves time, improves student results, and allows tutors / students to focus effort on instruction and learning.

Socrato allows for branding of reports and customization of learning analytics to meet the specific needs and styles of our customers. If you are interested in learning more about this service please contact us.

UPDATE
Looking for easy grading, scoring, and reporting tool for ACT and SAT – Check out our post on theTestGrader where in few clicks you can grade, score, and get personalized report for individual sections of test.

If you are at the event, look forward to see you later today.

Here are the directions: http://massinnovationnights.com/event-rsvp/google-map

Because we frequently receive inquires for ACT Diagnostic Analysis and Reporting, we’ve decided to make the ACT the next test we support as part of our “Companion Series” diagnostic reporting suite.  We know that tutors and students have to deal with the drawn-out scoring process for each ACT test. For experienced tutors, scoring student practice tests has become second nature, but it’s still not straight forward.

The entire scoring and scaling process is scattered across 13 pages for each test in the official guide. If you step back, and look at the entire process of scoring the ACT, it reminds me of filling out an annual tax return.

While you wait for us to incorporate the ACT into Socrato as a simple, efficient, and more effective tool, we thought we’d provide a barebones excel tool in the meantime.

This simple spreadsheet “ACT Scoring Tool” does not reduce the effort by much (as you still have to do the majority of manual lookups and calculations) but it does add value. The spreadsheet tool

• Simplifies the process of capturing the data. All calculations and results are captured on 1 page – instead of 7.
• Does some of the calculations and validations (in your manual worksheet process there is no way to know if you missed the questions in your count)
• Does some interesting and baseline analysis – e.g. What is the point impact of each wrong / missed question
• Makes data visual by automatically generating graphs

Since we’re in the midst of incorporating the ACT into Socrato, please send along any suggestions and feature requests.  Our ultimate vision is to create the best diagnostic analysis for the ACT.  To see how the process will work, watch the Socrato Overview video. If you want to know what the diagnostic analysis will look like, see the equivalent SAT Diagnostic analysis report.

If you are a Tutor and need to do the calculations for an ACT assessment test again and again, drop us an email at info@socrato.com and we will be happy to send you a copy of the current tool for free. All we expect in return is some feedback and encouragement.
Thanks

While working with a number of teachers and tutors, we noticed that many of them create their “binders” (a set of favorite questions, tests, and other materials such as reading passages) in real life, which they often share with others by photocopying. The binders contain a collection of their best material with lots of thought put in. We noticed a similar usage pattern in Socrato where many teachers collect their special questions and content, aligned with particular topic areas, or to help students with certain needs.

So taking a cue from Twitter, we just released features that allow a user (teacher or tutor) to follow other users (teachers and tutors). Whenever the “followed” user shares public material they have created, the “follower” will be notified. This way a teacher can assemble a content set, and all of their followers can reuse and collaborate on that material. Each individual user has privacy controls on how much of their profile and content is visible to other users.

Last night we released the “follow” feature in Socrato. Let us know what you think.

Read the article by Sally Holland at CNN.

Major updates were done in learning analytic and reporting area. Key high lights include:

• Teachers or tutors can create custom reports for group of students.
• Assessment data can be analyzed by teacher defined parameters and criteria. Example, school staff can look at the performance of a class by race, gender, lunch code or any other parameters they wish to define. This is already providing interesting insights to our current users.
• Learning data analytics is very tightly connected with learning content. Teacher can assemble relevant learning content just by clicking on the standards link in various reports.
• Question distribution report now shows the list of students for each response. 

In addition, number of bug fixes were made and usability issue where resolved.

As always, thank you all for your feedback. If you run into any issues please drop us an email or leave a comment.

Teachers who are tired of “cut and paste” can now go directly to our MCAS Question Search page, select the grade, select the strand standard, and we’ll provide a shopping list of questions fom which you can choose. If there are passages included, you can look at the passage detail with one click. Select the questions you like, put them in your QuestionCart, and create your own test. Print it for class assignments or assign it to students to practice online.

To teachers and school administrators, if you want learning data analysis for prior year “Test Item Analysis” from MCAS, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to give you custom demo or you can learn more on the Socrato website. We are working with a number of schools and tutoring centers and will be happy to share our work to see if we can be of help to you.

Issue Resolved

Increased testing effort on Safari browser
We have increased testing efforts on the Safari browser. We are finding a few issues and are making fixes to improve Socrato on Safari. There are certain issues, specifically “frozen” screens or dropdown selectors which are not working,  which we are hearing from you but we are not able to reproduce in our testing.

• Please let us know if you are having these issues so we can learn more about how to reproduce the problems.

Improved performance for assessment result upload with progress bar
A couple of you mentioned having issues with machine freezing while uploading of student scores. And refreshing of page was resulting in double data entry of the scores.

• Now when you do result upload, a progress indicator will appear to show the system is processing the student scores. In addition we have number of hidden changes which will eliminate duplicate upload.

Ability to delete or update previously uploaded session results
People were having difficulty in deleting or modifying the uploaded user data that was loaded in error

• We made it easy to edit and delete the entire upload if you uploaded the wrong data. There is a ‘Delete All’ button on Edit sessions page, or you can delete results student by student.
• In session list drop down there is a unique identifier (timestamp) for all your uploads that indicates when it was uploaded

Updated scoring calculation for Open Response question
The system was treating any data entry in open response question as correct, including a score of zero.

• Now if you assign points (greater than 0) to a question it will be marked as correct, while zero will be marked incorrect (instead of correct). All empty score will be considered as ungraded.
• In future we are considering adding the concept of partially correct. Let us know you would find this helpful.

Question Distribution report now shows Open Response Questions

• In the Question Distribution report you will get to see the open response and short description questions as part of report. Currently we are not proving the score distribution (it’s on high priority list)

Temporary workaround for Printing large passages (more work in progress – see below)
Few users are having issues printing large passage. It shows correctly on the computer screen but prints only partial information from certain browsers. We are able to reproduce the issue and have a temporary workaround.

• For long ELA passages current workaround is to print on Safari. It’s not perfect but does the job.
• To make global fix we will have to cut the passage images in smaller chunks to fit page size. It will take time because there are 143 passages. Please let us know any passage you want expedited and we will fix those first. We apologize about this oversight.

Printing Icon does not do anything on IE
In Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) when a user clicks on the print button, nothing happens and they get a javascript error.

• We are able to reproduce the issue on IE. We believe it is because the pop-up blocker is turned on. The fix for this is to either temporarily disable the pop-up blocker or add www.socrato.com to your “allow pop-up from this site” list.
• You can do that by going to Tools à pop-up blocker à turn off pop-up blocker

Please give us call if you want us to walk you through.

Some other changes have been done as well, including a lot more help has been added at places. Please let us know if there are particular places that are confusing and we will add more help in those areas as well.

Open Issues on Hot List

• Show some type of “Grouping Indicator” for question from same passage on Search Question page and Question List
• Large passage text not printing completely on paper, where as it is available online.
  • This will require few days of effort. If you have request for particular content set please let us know. We will fix those first.
• In certain circumstances the test heading and description are interchanging (showing incorrectly) on Test List page
  • We have seen this once, but never after that. If you are seeing this we would be very grateful if you contacted us so we can learn how to reproduce it.
• Printing issue – keeping questions and answers together on same page
  • We are looking onto this and it may take some time
• Content upload made easy – Questions upload for various types of questions from outside to Socrato. We have work in progress which will make this very easy. Please stay tuned.

Once again, thank you for your support and please feel free to reach out to me any time for any Socrato related question.
Best Regards,

Socrato Team