NUI Galway spin out company Qpercom has been chosen as a winner of a prestigious 2019 e-Assessment Award in a competition of glocal assessment providers.
Qpercom was selected as winner for ‘Best Use of Summative Assessment 2019’, with winners chosen by a panel of international experts at the recent awards hosted by the e-Assessment Association in London.
Summative Assessment examines the outcome of courses and stands between the student and their accreditation.
Qpercom’s Observe software solution was created ten years ago at NUI Galway to digitalise the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) used in healthcare education to assess clinical skills of students.
Today it is used to measure thousands of clinical assessments in universities around the world.
Dr Thomas Kropmans, CEO of Qpercom and Senior Lecturer in Medical Informatics and Education at NUIG said “We have supplied Observe to universities worldwide for over ten years, with thousands of students and their examiners benefiting from the technology.”
He went on to say that receiving an award with “international recognition of this calibre” is the “icing on the cake” for the company.
Dr Kropmans highlighted the importance of providing in depth, accurate information which can have a huge impact on the future of the people whose decisions are being assessed.
“Qpercom’s advanced assessment solutions provides detailed psychometric analysis. Our work allows educators to make reliable decisions of who should pass or fail.”
“These decisions are backed up by embedding the Standard Error of Measurement, which should be incorporated in any kind of robust assessment.”
Qpercom spun out from the School of Medicine at NUI Galway in 2008. Originally based at the University’s Business and Innovation Centre with a team of seven specialists, Qpercom provides advanced assessment software solutions to universities globally, including the University of Dundee, Karolinska Institute and the National University of Singapore.
“Observe assesses our future clinicians and nothing is more critical than assessing life and death situations,” Dr Kropmans added.
“Our mission to advance assessment will continue, and we are grateful for this recognition of the direction of our work by the e-Assessment Association.”
For more information about Qpercom, visit: www.qpercom.com or follow on Twitter @qpercom.
