Standardized tests. The love/hate relationship that students and professionals have with standardized tests has endured through the years.
Conceived in 1845, standardized tests have come a long way to become an integral part of the educational system. These tests were initially designed to identify the best teaching methods so that all children had equal opportunities to learn in a classroom setting. In recent decades, standardized tests have evolved to also assess students and professionals’ knowledge in subjects and skills necessary to succeed in college and advance their respective careers.
While it’s up for debate whether standardized tests are good or bad, students and professionals alike need to prepare for these high stake admissions and licensing exams to make the most of their education and career advancements. And everyone loves to get the best scores possible. But because exams like SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, and the like, play a crucial role in defining students’ and professionals’ careers, test takers spend long, anxious hours preparing for them.
And trying to make test taking more of a love than a hate relationship, Kaplan Test Prep has helped millions of students succeed in over 100 standardized tests through quality test preparation products and services. With innovation as a mission, Kaplan turned to big data to identify areas to transform their organization and improve the way students learn. However, for them, like others, undertaking a big data initiative is easier said than done.
The organization accumulated a large amount of data in different file formats and it was near impossible to visualize and make sense of the data. Kaplan searched for an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that could alleviate the challenge of bringing data into a central place and focus more on decision making. That’s when they turned to SnapLogic Enterprise Integration Cloud.
Once Kaplan had SnapLogic in place, the Engineering and Architecture team was able to:
- Undertake Big Data initiative by moving large amounts of data from over 50 applications to a data lake hosted on Amazon Redshift
- Connect applications to help departments across the organization create reports for data analysis
- Empower data scientists and product teams with real-time student feedback and data profiling to uncover areas to improve their students’ learning journey
With easily accessible data, Kaplan continues to innovate, and help students and professionals thrive on standardized tests and gain more control in defining their careers.
Interested in learning more? Watch this video to learn how Kaplan is using data to help prep students and professionals take high stake exams:
