Test-scoring firm to set up business in SW Weld

LONGMONT – A full-service standardized test-grading firm is poised to create hundreds of jobs here when it begins scoring thousands upon thousands of exams in early April at its new operation near Longmont in southwest Weld County.

Measured Progress, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit organization, writes, proctors, scores and reports on standardized tests for several state departments of education, said Chris Hood, site manager for the Longmont operation.

Measured Progress now has three test-scoring centers throughout the continental U.S., in Dover, N.H.; Albany, N.Y.; and Longmont in a 33,000-square-foot space at 2950 Colorful Ave., formerly occupied by Concepts Direct Inc.

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John Weston, who’s leasing the space to Measured Progress, said the New Hampshire nonprofit signed an eight-year lease, though he declined to share the price or terms of that deal.

Hood said Measured Progress picked Longmont for its third center based on its proximity to a major metropolitan area, big employee-recruiting base and the lease price per square foot of space. The company’s business is seasonal, with huge batches of tests scored in the spring and fall.

While many parts of Measured Progress’ standardized tests are multiple-choice questions that can be graded by machines, the testing organization often includes in its exams open-ended questions that require human readers, Hood said. Such questions include math problems where students must show work, essays and short-answer responses to reading passages, Hood said.

Grading answers to those questions requires more “manpower, but you can also get a greater understanding of what a student knows and what a student can do,” Hood said.

To grade those questions, Kelly Services, an on-site human resources group that’s contracting with the testing giant, is looking to hire about 750 readers for Measured Progress by early April, said Robb Guyor, Kelly’s onsite manager. Guyor said in early March that only about 20 percent of those readers had been hired.

This spring’s readers will be temporary contract workers who will spend between three and four months scoring standards-based tests for school districts in Massachusetts, Nevada and Maine. Measured Progress readers will work in two shifts – from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. – and will make about $11 an hour, Guyor said.

Readers are required to have an associates or bachelor’s degree, and must have passed at least two college-level courses in every subject that they’ll be grading, Guyor said.

Measured Progress’ large work force will provide a jolt to Longmont’s local economy, as readers – many of whom will commute from as far as Denver and Fort Collins –  will buy gas, food, coffee and other products and services from area businesses, Guyor said.

“I’m sure Starbucks will notice that we’re here,´ said Jo Bales, a human resources recruiter with Kelly. Bales also noted that because many Measured Progress readers are retirees or graduate students, their hires create workers out of residents who formerly weren’t drawing an income.

Hood said that while Measured Progress’ Longmont office will only have about five full-time employees on its payroll, he expects between 85 percent and 90 percent of this spring’s hundreds of temporary hires to come back in the fall for another season of grading.

“People will come back time and time again, season after season,” Hood said.

There would seem to be some perks to doing so. While at least one of the Longmont facility’s two grading rooms is filled with more than 100 computer terminals, the spacious building also boasts a fancy and high-tech break room.

The huge break room has eight refrigerators, 16 microwaves, two dishwashers, fake plants and a waterfall.

“We understand that the creature comforts of the work environment are really important for you to be able to be successful,” Hood said.

The first batch of tests to be graded in Longmont mostly will be reading and math exams of third- through eighth-graders, Hood said.

Those exams will be graded on 455 flat-screen computers that are packed into two giant rooms at the Longmont office. Workstations are arranged by the dozen around rectangular tables.

Hood said that students’ written responses are scanned into Measured Progress’ database as images. Images are then fed to readers, who assign points to each response based on their extensive training and scoring rubrics, Hood said.

How many reads each response gets is totally dependent on Measured Progress’ contracts with individual departments of education, Hood said. While some government agencies pay for all of their exams to be read by multiple graders, others demand that only 2 percent of tests get two reads, and only then to calculate score reliability, he said.

Once exams are graded, scores are zipped electronically to Measured Progress’ New Hampshire headquarters, where extensive reports are developed for the scores of individual students, schools, districts and the entire state, Hood said.