Case Studies \ A tool to judge intercultural effectiveness in people

Our client, a US based human resource management organization, wanted to offer their customers, specifically educational institutions, with an online tool to assess the intercultural effectiveness of students. Intercultural effectiveness refers to the manner in which a student interacts with people from other cultures. The assessment tool, developed by Icreon on the .net framework, includes two components, a professor module that allows people to sign-up for the test and a student module wherein the test can be taken. Based on the answers provided, a detailed assessment is provided to the students.

Business Requirements

One of the services offered by our client is to assess the intercultural effectiveness of people. This assessment is made via means of a test - Intercultural Effectives Scale (IES) - developed by our client. With the objective of easing the process of registering and taking the test our client wanted to offer their customers a chance to take the test online. People taking the test must be part of a group, which can be setup by the professors/managers. On submitting the test the system is required to calculate the score, interpret the results and generate a word document for the same. Professors/managers were to be provided with the means to track the students/employees in their group.

A web based tool to conduct online assessments

Benefits:

• Provides an instant evaluation of the test results
• Professors/Managers can track the progress of their students/employees

Users:
The solution can be accessed by various types of users:

• Professor/Manager: Users who can setup tests
• Students/Employees: Users who can take the IES test online

Solution:
The solution developed by Icreon on the .net framework allows people to sign-up for the IES assessment and take the test online. The system provides an instantaneous evaluation of the test based on the answers provided. The solution is multi-lingual and supports both English and Japanese.

Users can register with the website as a student/employee or professor/manager. Professors and managers can setup tests for their employees/students who in turn can login to take the test.

The Professor Module can be used to setup and manage assessment groups. Each group consists of a specific number of students/employees who can take the test. Professors can track the status (test completed or not) of the groups and can also view individual test results as well as a consolidated group results.

Students or employees can access the Student Module to take the test. Students are associated with a group and need to provide their group id, as reference, to take the test. The test consists of 63 questions (the questions and answers are retrieved from an XML file) that have been divided into various dimensions (sections). Each dimension represents a specific area of a user's personality. On completion of the test, the results are computed and displayed. The interpretation (i.e. the score in each dimension and a descriptive interpretation of the score) of the result is made available in the form of a word document. Each student can only take the test once, however if a test has been left incomplete it will be available to the student till such time that he/she completes it.

Technologies used in developing this application are: