What is the difference between a survey and an assessment? The short answer is not much. If you think back to your days in school, the tests you took were nothing more than a scored survey. Chances are the survey design had both structured and unstructured questions with the intent of measuring your knowledge at a point in time.
In the working world, employee assessments, or evaluations as they are also known, share many of the same characteristics as the tests you took in school. They are scored, may or may not have open-ended questions, and are used to measure base knowledge. In the training realm, assessments are often used before a formal training course to provide an idea of which content individual students need to focus more heavily on.
Although it’s primary focus is a survey and reporting tool, Cvent has the power and flexibility to serve in the capacity as employee assessment software. In addition to assessments, the tool can be used to measure employee attitudes and serve as an employee evaluation tool.
Some things to consider when setting up an assessment: first, what is the knowledge domain to be tested? This may require input from a subject matter expert (SME). The individual topics covered in an assessment of computer networks or Cyber security, for example, are outside the domain of most survey researchers. This knowledge will need to be converted into a series of questions, each with multiple categories for answers. The SME can also provide a scoring algorithm that assigns students, based upon their score, to different levels of remediation. For example if a student scores above 85% perhaps they are ready for a networking bootcamp. On the other hand if they score below 85% then they may need a fundamentals course.
Once the questions are developed, as the survey author, you will need to ‘turn on’ the scoring function. This is done under the Settings/Configuration Options tab. You also have the option to set a timer essentially limiting the amount of time a student can take to answer the assessment. The table below shows an example of a question and the fields needed to assign a value to the correct response. This is necessary to provide an overall score for the assessment. We will cover score reporting in the next post.
