Surpass 12.13 Pre-Release Webinar

The latest release of Surpass has seen a number of new innovative features introduced to the assessment platform. Join Tim and Brigitte as they look at each new feature in detail and answer questions submitted during the live broadcast.

Topics Covered

All New ‘Tasks’ Tab (0:48)

As part of our ongoing commitment to optimising the user experience within Surpass, our design team have been looking at some of the most popular task management tools available and incorporating some of their appropriate features directly into the assessment platform.

By using this new tab, collaborative workflow tracking is simplified and tasks can easily be set for other users depending on your allocated user permissions, creating a streamlined tool for improving communication and productivity, all within one platform.

Item Version Compare (6:19)

Until now, users could view the ‘Item History’ of an item in Surpass to see any changes that have been made. In this most recent release, a new ‘Version Compare’ feature has been introduced to enable a visual comparison of different saved versions of an item, allowing you to see any changes that have been made side by side.
N.B. Version compare is available to all Surpass Community organisations, however due to it’s high data load, it requires a request sent to your Account Manager to activate the feature.

Enhancements to MCQ and MRQ questions (8:50)

In response to requests from the Surpass Community to streamline their workflow when creating MCQ and MRQ items, answer options can now be manually re-ordered using a simple drag and drop interface, or ordered alphabetically at the click of a button.

Also, for Multiple Response questions, there is now an option to set a minimum number of responses before the question is allowed to be marked as ‘complete’. For candidates, we have enhanced usability by creating a counter, which tracks how many answer options they have selected. This is useful for organisations who may have questions with a large number of possible answers.

Secure File Attach for Bring-Your-Own-Device (11:58)

With a growing desire from testers to expand into ‘breakthrough’ BYOD environments, we are continuously adding more features into Surpass to help you overcome challenges in this area.

Secure File Attach allows item authors to create special versions of popular document types that open in a ‘locked down’ state. This allows them to create innovative, advanced questions and simulation type items, by allowing candidates access to a greater variety of third party applications without compromising test security.

Pooled Test Times for multi-section exams (14:35)

Surpass has allowed fixed section length within an exam for some time now, and recently members of the Surpass Community have highlighted a need for some sections to allow pooling of time. For example, sections A, B, and C might each have a restricted length of 15 minutes each, however you may want to allow candidates to carry any time saved in section B over to section C.

This feature is discussed in more detail in the webinar, using diagrams to aid the explanation, followed by a demonstration of how simple it is to enable the function in Surpass.

Lock Item Settings and Content (17:37)

When building exams within Surpass, there are a number of administration features that do not affect the display or outcome of an item or its score, such as tags.

Once a test has been created and is ready for use, you may want to lock the content so that any changes made to items in ‘Item Authoring’ do not affect the items delivered to the candidate, or the ‘Reporting’ statistics. In the new release of Surpass, you can now decide whether you want to lock the content of the items, or just the settings and tags, independently of each other.

Users now have the option to choose whether these assets are locked from editing throughout the testing process, or to allow test creators to update and amend them even after testing has taken place.

Section Review Panels for Candidates (18:50)

The section review panel can be made available to candidates for tests in HTML delivery and gives them a quick visual reference of which questions have been flagged or not completed. This is ideal for organisations whose exams contain extremely large numbers of items, offering candidates peace of mind they have completed the test to the best of their ability via an intuitive function.

Item Response Theory Scoring (22:23)

One of the most exciting features to be developed for this most recent update is the ability for organisations to use Item Response Theory (IRT) based scoring. The benefits of IRT scoring are already well known among organisations using psychometric scoring, and this functionality is the perfect accompaniment to Surpass’ Linear On-The-Fly Testing (LOFT).

Tom Gomersall, a Technical Architect at BTL, has prepared a ‘whiteboard explainer’ video talking more about the details of how IRT works and the benefits this brings for candidate comparability in certain testing scenarios. The video can be seen as part of the webinar in this clip.