IN THIS EDITION:

  • Diversity Statement

  • WorldSpeak has a New Name & New Pricing!

  • New Combinations of Test Sections for all STAMP Tests

  • Remote Proctoring and Avant’s New Retake Policy

  • Clever Integration & Automated Rostering

  • Global Y-C.R.E.D!

A MESSAGE FROM AVANT’S CEO, DAVID BONG

 
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At long last, this COVID school year is over. As parents and citizens, our thanks to you and all of the educators who kept education going for our country’s students.

This has been a time of reflection and change. One of the positive things that have come out of this past year has been increased recognition of the importance of equity and diversity. Here is my statement on this topic.

Diversity is a great source of strength for our country. A core part of Avant’s mission is to promote and support equitable access to language education and recognition of language skills both for English and all of the other 350 plus languages spoken in the United States. Avant delivers tests in 40 languages representing every continent. At Avant, we hire the very best candidate for each position and have built a team that is diverse in many ways. This has helped us develop a culture of openness and creativity that makes Avant stronger, and better able to fulfill our mission to create a better future through the magic of language.

NEW NAME AND PRICING FOR AVANT’S TESTS FOR LESS COMMONLY TAUGHT LANGUAGES

Avant has led the field in the development of high-quality, affordable assessments in Less Commonly Tested Languages with our line of WorldSpeak tests of Writing and Speaking in 23 languages. I am proud to announce that this fall we will be bringing these tests into our line of STAMP tests where they will now be branded as STAMP WS (Writing and Speaking) assessments. We are not only changing the name of the tests, we are lowering the price to align it with the price of our STAMP tests for commonly-taught languages because we believe in the principle of equal access regardless of language. STAMP WS tests for Less Commonly Tested Languages will now have the same low price for education as our other STAMP tests. Deeper discounts are available for purchases of larger numbers of tests.

NEW COMBINATIONS OF TEST SECTIONS AVAILABLE FOR ALL STAMP TESTS

Beginning in the fall, our STAMP 4S assessments will be available in any combination of the four domains of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. You will be able to purchase a single domain, such as speaking, or any combination such as writing, speaking, and listening.

REMOTE PROCTORING AND AVANT’S NEW RETAKE POLICY

This has also been a challenging year for delivering assessments to home-study students. From the beginning of the crisis, Avant stated our policy that Avant’s tests were valuable measurement tools that required secure proctoring by educators using their school’s technology, or by proctors from Avant using the AvantProctor platform. We developed AvantProctor to address this pressing need despite the difficulty and expense of doing so. While this policy may have cost us some customers, we stand by our decision and belief that for any test to be valid it requires rigorous proctoring. The crisis also caused us to reflect on our test retake policy and the responsibility that we have as an assessment company to take the lead in promoting and following best practices in assessment. This led us to create a new policy that we adopted on July 1, 2021. Read the full policy here.

AVANT’S INTEGRATION WITH CLEVER FOR SINGLE SIGN-ON AND AUTOMATED ROSTERING

As we have announced earlier, Avant STAMP is fully integrated with the Clever tool that enables single sign-on and automated rostering from school information systems. If you are interested in setting up Clever to use for Avant’s tests, this is a good time to do it when there may be a little more bandwidth for school technology teams. If you are interested in setting up Clever to deliver Avant’s tests please contact Avant at: info@avantassessment.com

AVANT IS PROUD TO SPONSOR GLOBAL Y–C.R.E.D.

Finally, Avant is very proud to be a sponsor of the Global Seal of Biliteracy’s Y-C.R.E.D. 2021 event for language students in the US and around the world. I hope that you and your students will sign up for this exciting and free international event.

Thank you and have a great summer!

 
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