Of Course I Hear Voices: I Own Parrots

Our Assessment Center handles lots of different tests. One of the things we proctor are tests for students who need ADA accomadations. Most students just need extra time, but some students also need their tests in an audio format. We have software that lets  us scan the test, and then it reads it. The catch is the software doesn't always read it in the right order, and sometimes it cannot read words or parts of a test correctly. In those cases, we have to tell the software the proper order and how things are actually pronounced. This really  isn't hard. Even on the advanced Chemistry tests, I could hold my own. I didn't remember all I had learned in high school and college. I couldn't answer the questions, but I could make the test read properly. This semester, the moment I had been dreading finally happened: we had math tests that needed converted to audio. This was a cruel twist of fate because: 1) I'm dyslexic 2) I hate...no I fear math. In third grade,

I deal with a few test vendors at work. All of them have things I love about them, and of course things that make me batty. Most times, these things even each other out. However, there is an exception to this rule. We found it last week. One of our vendors completely revamped their website. I'm okay with the overhaul. It actually looks very nice. They just failed to mention the upgrade to any of their clients (epic fail #1).  We arrived Monday to discover we had a "new assessment handbook" to read before we could proctor this test. Really, there were not any changes we had to learn, so we went on with our day. Tuesday, we were proctoring this test again. One of our employees made a mistake. Our one ACT test has to be at a certain screen resolution. That test accounts for about 40-60 percent of our traffic most months. IT has set our default to that resolution. This other test has to be at another resolution. Our part timer forgot and did not change it. In the old vers