McCann Associates

McCann Associates Legacy

In 1959, Forbes McCann founded McCann Associates in the Somerton section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly the Chief of Examinations for the City of Philadelphia, Mr. McCann was aware of the need for fair and valid assessments of civil servants, a system based on knowledge and skills possessed by an applicant, rather than chance factors.

Mr. McCann's accurate reading of the marketplace placed him in the perfect position to assist Civil Service Commissions, municipal governments and public safety agencies to develop bias-free hiring and promotion processes during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when employment procedures were under scrutiny for being discriminatory and biased. Through the years, hundreds of thousands of prospective professionals can point to a McCann assessment as the starting point to a successful and fulfilling career.

In 1985, Mr. McCann passed leadership of the organization to Philip E. Dolan, who was President and CEO of McCann Associates until his retirement in December 2002. In early 2003, McCann Associates began its partnership with Vantage Laboratories and its subsidiary, Vantage Learning.

McCann and its parent company Vantage Laboratories provide innovative software application services to corporations, educational institutions and public organizations worldwide. We were the first to release an Artificial Intelligence and natural language scoring engine, Intellimetric®, into the education market. Intellimetric® was the first engine to score as reliably as or more so than human experts. In addition, we have designed, developed and implemented several large-scale on-line applications for educational software services. By leveraging Vantage Laboratories' Artificial Intelligence and linguistics research with our years of software application development experience, McCann has developed award-winning solutions utilizing our unique item publishing, item banking, exam delivery and training, and we remain the leader in linguistic technologies.

Together, Vantage and McCann's proprietary assessment solutions are employed by the most highly respected educational institutions in the world - the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAT®), the Association of American Medical Schools (AAMC®), and ACT® just to name a few. Private and public institutions rely on our solutions to make credible, reliable judgments of individuals. General Electric-Microwave Data Systems and Net Security employ our software solutions for high stakes certification exam. Thousands of schools districts across the United States and dozens of entities abroad rely upon our education and software solutions for high-stakes, formative and diagnostic decision-making.

Our linguistic capabilities are second to none, with programs currently running in ten or more languages. By way of example, our Measured Success application integrates English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese and our Correct English product toggles into about a dozen different languages.

Our data center, a secure, unmanned, 24 X 7 facility with complete redundancy of all technology infrastructure, capable of being managed remotely, and located just a few miles from our headquarters, handled over 250 million online assessment transactions last year alone. McCann is a leader in Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery of secure online assessments, tests, and certification needs. A partnership with McCann assures you of a stable, reliable, proven network under our complete control and ownership.