The New York State Education Department is one of the largest state agencies and conducts business with each of the 705 NYS school districts and 33 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).

The NYS Education Department recognized that they needed a redesign ot their GED scoring system. Previously, the GED test answers were sent to a third-party vendor who read the paper test answers and produced a report. NYSED then took that report and data entered the information into a legacy GED system. The objective of this engagement was to redesign the GED Scoring system so that the tests are read and scored at NYSED, thus eliminating the need for the cost and effort of having a third-party vendor to score the tests.

IS Consilium, Inc was contracted by New York State Education Department (NYSED) to assist in the redesign their current GED Scoring System. NYSED had purchased equipment that reads the paper GED tests and produces an electronic file. IS Consilium was responsible for redesigning the GED system so that the file produced by the scanner was manipulated and stored in an Oracle database. To accomplish this objective, an IS Consilium analyst conducted several Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions with the users of the current GED system. The JAD sessions were used to determine what the data model for the Oracle database should be in order to meet the requirements of NYSED. The data model has been created and IS Consilium implemented a web-based application that reads in the scanned data and calculates test scores. Since the GED test questions and formats change on a yearly basis, the application is flexible enough to allow NYSED to easily change the scoring methods from within the application as needed. Having the GED system in-house and on-line allows NYSED to score the GED tests more quickly, more accurately and with at a lower cost.