Langhorne — This month McCann Associates, a world leader in higher education technologies celebrates several significant milestones including a new president, new clients, and updates to its key products.

McCann Associates proudly welcomes the newest addition to its team—Mr. Mark Shay. As a business leader with a long history of success helping higher education institutions recruit, retain, and better serve students, Mark Shay joins McCann Associates as President. In a career that has spanned three decades, Shay has developed products like GradSchools.com and StudyAbroad.com, created international student recruiting solutions for agents and universities, and helped numerous organizations with business development.  His primary role is finding new applications and new markets for Vantage Labs’ powerful technologies, as well as managing their higher education division.

McCann Associates develops and delivers Florida’s Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT), a computer adaptive placement test utilized by The Florida College System and high schools throughout the state. The purpose of the PERT is to determine accurate course placement based on a student’s skills and abilities. The PERT comprises both placement and diagnostic tests in mathematics, reading, and writing.  The state contract that created the PERT expires in September of this year, but the relationships with McCann’s Florida Association of College Test Administrators (FACTA) partners do not.  The company will continue to honor the terms of the state contract with each participating institution for the foreseeable future.

McCann Associates also delivers the Virginia Placement Test (VPT) for Virginia’s Community College System and the City Colleges of Chicago Placement Test.  In Virginia, the company is piloting a fully customizable Adaptive Learning Environment® and Adaptive Placement Platform™ extension to the College Success® platform.  This system is equipped with computer adaptive and linear diagnostic testing, which assesses the knowledge and skills of high school and college students and supplies targeted feedback to address each student’s needs.

In the public service sector, the company also produces off-the-shelf and custom exams for police and fire departments nationwide.  Driven in part by the company’s powerful iseek.ai™ information engine, McCann Associates helps individual departments create effective exams for the recruitment and promotion of police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical service personnel.

Individual institutions are also turning to McCann Associates for their course placement needs.  A recent new customer is Guild Education. Guild Education works with organizations to offer education as a strategic benefit to their employees, helping employees with higher education advancement and degree completion while at the same time improving organizational recruitment and retention efforts.  Guild Education uses the College Success platform to deliver computer adaptive placement tests designed to determine their employees’ college readiness.  Guild Advisors then uses this data to place students in courses aligned with their depth of knowledge, ensuring that students are placed on a path toward the successful achievement of their academic goals.

The company’s IntelliMetric® platform remains the gold standard in automated essay scoring with over 100 billion users served.  Used for both low- and high-stakes assessment environments, the most significant application of IntelliMetric has been in the area of assessment and instruction. IntelliMetric technology powers the company’s award-winning My Access!® student writing program and dashboard tools like WriteVue™ that provide detailed analytics on student writing. For higher education, government, and professional testing, IntelliMetric powers the writing portion of McCann Associates’ College Success assessment and remediation tool.