Nikkei Newspaper

Reported by Ai Okamoto

http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20060111/227130

ITEC, which carries on education service business such as preparatory training lessons for the Data Processing Specialist Qualification Examination, will initiate a new type of IT education service for corporate customers, to be effective in March. The major characteristic function of the new service is to identify individual employee’s skills in advance and to provide in an efficient way such education as adapted to their skill levels. For identification of skill levels, ITEC will apply an IT skill assessment and analysis tool called “TeckChek”, which is owned by TeckChek Co., Inc. in U.S.A

The TeckChek tool has three major features. The first one is that it applies a new test method called “Adaptive Testing” in which the difficulty degree of the next question to be asked is changed, depending on the content of the answer made by an individual test taker. If a correct answer is made by him/her, then a more difficult question is asked next. Otherwise, a question of lower difficulty degree is asked next. In this way, ITEC says that they can determine an exact skill level for each individual by presenting least possible number of questions to test takers.

The second feature is that TeckChek is capable of assessing skill levels by subdivided technology area. In the “database” field, for example, the technology area is subdivided into such detailed sub-areas for assessment as “Oracle Database Performance Tuning”. Presently, there are 250 different subdivided areas available for assessment. The third feature is that TeckChek questions are so designed that they cannot be answered correctly only by tuition or perception. A single test question is composed of choices from among five candidate answers, and there is not necessarily only one correct answer to a question, but a maximum of three correct answers may exist. So correct answers come to 25 different combinations of answers in total, which means that it is easily distinguishable whether or not the test taker selected his/her answer by intuition.

Dr. Marie-Paule Donsimoni (Refer to photo), CEO of U.S. TeckChek Co., Inc., who developed this tool says with confidence, “Effective implementation and operation of IT education depends mostly on whether personnel skills can be appropriately identified or not. In this sense, TeckChek will surely contribute effectively for this purpose.”

The pricing for the new education service is not yet determined by ITEC. Also, ITEC has no plan to sell the tool itself for the present.

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