Altus Assessments moves admissions forward with Altus Suite
Painting a more complete picture of applicants with a new set of assessments: Casper, Duet, and Snapshot.
TORONTO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Altus Assessments is proud to move admissions forward with Altus Suite, a comprehensive set of assessment tools that help admissions teams look at the whole person, ultimately enabling them to make defensible, high-stakes decisions with ease and confidence. The company's launch and announcement was made earlier today at the Annual Educational Conference hosted by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
"This is a turning point for the admissions community," says Kelly Dore, co-founder of Altus Assessments and co-creator of Casper, the company's situational judgement test (SJT) used by hundreds of programs with over 15 years of data backing its reliability and predictive validity. "We've heard for so long that there are few reliable tools and data points to evaluate personal and professional attributes, even though official frameworks by the regulating bodies of so many people-centered professions emphasize their importance. We're proud to respond to that call with a comprehensive set of assessments that builds on the value we've seen with Casper. We believe these tools provide unique data points across these attributes, and while there is no silver bullet, using them alongside other metrics at multiple points throughout the selection process will benefit programs and applicants."
Altus Suite is comprised of:
- Casper, an online, open-response SJT that screens applicants for 10 non-cognitive competencies such as ethics, empathy and collaboration resulting in a single score
- Duet, a value-alignment assessment that evaluates applicants for "fit" by understanding how what they value in a program aligns with what the program has to offer
- Snapshot, an asynchronous video-response tool that allows programs to further probe an applicant's motivation and communication skills
- Altus Insights, an all-in-one admissions data platform for programs that ties together all the assessments and data points to support informed decision making
The assessments were built on years of research and were successfully piloted with 11 residency training programs and over 5,000 applicants in the United States during the 2020/2021 cycle. Feedback from both programs and applicants was positive and showed that the assessments offered metrics that could be easily used at each stage in the selection process. We know that other programs face similar challenges with their selection processes and could benefit from having more standardized information on their applicants' personal professional attributes. That's why the entire suite is now available to all US graduate medical programs (GME) and on a pilot basis to undergraduate medical programs (UME), while all other programs have access to Casper, Snapshot, and Altus Insights.
About Altus Assessments
Altus empowers higher education institutions to look beyond book smarts, and to identify and nurture exceptional professionals by using unique data to generate meaningful insights that influence key academic decisions. We do this through Altus Suite, made up of Casper, Snapshot, and Duet – assessments that provide a clearer, more holistic view of applicants. Our assessments are used by over 400 academic partners in the US, Canada, Australia (and growing!) with 200,000+ applicants taking our assessments each year, including 90% of Canadian and US medical school applicants. We also host the Admissions Summit, an annual 3-day conference, and power the Alo Grant, an annual $100,000 research fund. Learn more at altus.as or follow us at twitter.com/altusinc.
SOURCE Altus Assessments Inc.
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