NTS Invited Talk 1: Educational and Professional Testing of National Testing Service-Pakistan

Duration: 30 Minutes

22-Dec-2015 | 1145-1215 | Seminar Hall SEECS, NUST

The emergence of Testing and Assessment era in early 21st century in Professional and Academic Scenario is a significant milestone in Pakistan. In the past the admissions in HEIs of Pakistan were made only on the basis of previous academic achievements and there was no standardized mechanism to infer the current level of individual’s or group’s competence in some defined criterion domain from test scores. The National Education Policy 1998-2010 penned down the establishment of standardized testing system in higher education in Pakistan.

To comply with the stipulation of National Education policy 1998-2010 and IT policy of Government of Pakistan, NTS was founded in 2002 for establishing the earnestly needed Testing and Assessment culture at macro level. Being a pioneer organization of Testing and Assessment, National Testing Service (NTS) is setting standards for improving the quality of higher education as well as helping the private and government organizations in the selection of the best people possible to stay ahead of the competition. NTS in June 2003 tested 17000 candidates with meagre resources and now as an established organization has tested more than 4.5 million in 2014-2015. The total number of candidates of 470 clients and associate partners, so far tested in short span of time is 11,078,35. A panel of more than 2000 experts from different fields, educationists, professionals, item developers and reviewers is attached with NTS. There are more than 400566 items for different categories of general GAT and subject GAT in its databank that has generated 755 tests since 2003. Besides providing Testing services, the organization is fulfilling its social responsibility by launching ‘NTS Need based Scholarship Program’ and ‘NTS Scholarship Program for IDP’s’ for school, college and university education and has awarded 400 scholarships (approximately 44 million) in first phase (2014-15). For developing test items the content and curriculum department of NTS follows the well established procedures guided by the principles of assessment and testing theories and the quality of item development process is ensured by adopting standard operating procedures. As a matter of fact majority of degree awarding institutions heavily rely on Graduate Assessment Test (GAT) and National Aptitude Test (NAT) scores for their MS/MSc & MPhil and under-graduate / graduate applicants respectively as pre-requisite for admissions. Not only in academic sectors, NTS has established its strong position in different fields of private and Govt. sectors for developing and conducting employment, promotion and performance tests. Due to the fairness and transparency in its process, NTS has been honoured with the membership of ISO 9001-2008, IAEA-USA, Preferred Associate (EPA) of ETS-USA in Pakistan, APQN, CiTO, Associate of Test Publisher (ATP) USA and ONESQA Thailand. The Research and Data Analysis department performs different empirical and qualitative analysis of customized and general testing tools to provide valuable information about test parameters to its clients and to stakeholders at large to improve the quality of test items. The validity power of GAT has supported the use of GAT scores as pre admission criteria. The reliability level, difficulty level and discrimination index of items of different test categories fall in recommended average rang. Predictive validity of NAT and GAT is comparable with the predictive validity coefficients of other assessment measures like, SAT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT etc

NTS in line with its mission and objectives is achieving its excellence with the support of its clients, partners, professionals, experts, educationists and its competent staff who are putting their head and heart in building sustainable educational and professional standards.