My Access Competition Update for OTS Sales Team

9/11/06

Led by Lorna Maguire

Key instructional differences:

·  Criterion only saves first and last versions of an essay – all others are lost.

·  Criterion really only analyzes informative and persuasive

·  Criterion cannot score essays over 800-900 words.

·  Criterion is not very good at scoring essays that are outside of the 5 paragraph standard model essay.

·  Criterion’s essay scoring is unimetric. This means that it is not genre specific. In fact, their engine overall is very similar to Approximator.

·  Criterion’s accuracy is well below the accuracy of My Access. See the GMAT study of e-rater vs. IntelliMetric

·  Criterion does not have

·  Almost all of Criterion’s training is virtual. Our Professional Development is much more comprehensive and focuses on integrating My Access into the curriculum.

·  Criterion scores holistic only and then gives “indicator feedback” on traits but cannot score traits like we do.

·  Criterion cannot give My-Tutor-style feedback on an essay while it is in progress.

·  Criterion is not aligned to any state standards.

·  Criterion does not align to any textbooks

Log-in to Criterion:

Assignments do not give you any indication of the group information associated with it.

The user can view score report, errors, model papers and where errors have occurred in their essay.

Here is one of their score reports:

My Access analyzes up to 40 grammar rules, Criterion analyzes 12 grammar rules.

Criterion aims to highlight Main Idea sentences but does a poor job of it. We are building this functionality (live in Spring ’07) and we will do it very well. In Criterion the “Main Idea” sentence is the first sentence in the paragraph. If you cut that sentence out and resubmit then you’ll see that the new first sentence in the paragraph is now designated as the Main Idea sentence.

Criterion’s feedback is the same for 4th graders and 12th graders. Their feedback is not grade-level specific or user-specific at all.

Criterion is not nearly as user-friendly as My Access.

Criterion is currently in the process of rebuilding their sales team. And all of their product development is done by an outside company which slows down their responsiveness.

Key points that you must hit when selling against Criterion:

1.)  Our accuracy and reliability is significantly better than ETS’s. Reference the SAT and GMAT work that we do.

2.)  We have 72 NCLB-style reports that teachers and administrators can run from the system

3.)  We have up to a 7 layer hierarchy that allows users to view data all the way up to the state level.

The only bullet ETS has in their gun vs. us is price and at any price Criterion is a waste of money.