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With 30-years ’ experience developing item banking and assessment delivery systems for some of the biggest international examination boards , the Minerva team has now channelled that knowledge into creating a complete , end-to-end assessment system . Simon Beeston , Director of Assessment , Minerva , tells Intelligent SME . tech more about the company and how it has developed a platform that can deliver any type of assessment all the way through the assessment life cycle .

What is your story ? What motivated you to create Minerva ?

When we started Minerva in 2018 , it was after many years of working in the field of international examinations , in both the public and private sectors and in different verticals . Ideal you might think , but it had often been as frustrating as it was rewarding , and the frustration was always a result of the hidden complexities in developing and running examinations and the compromises you inevitably had to make to fit in with both legacy systems and what you might call legacy thinking .

As a result , successes were often short-term , with hidden workarounds to make business processes ‘ work ’. Coming off the back of that , we were determined to develop a platform that would be flexible enough to deliver any type of assessment all the way through the assessment life cycle , and clever enough to make some of those complex assessment processes much , much easier to manage .

In fact , we either wanted to automate them completely , or build all of the necessary tools into the platform so that the application could manage all of that complexity , leaving the enduser to manage the overall process . A process that could then scale to deliver as many types of assessments as the organisation required .

Who is your typical customer and what challenges are they looking to overcome ?

Examinations are ubiquitous throughout education and the world of work , of course , and can have very high stakes when used for things like determining immigration eligibility .

WE WERE DETERMINED TO DEVELOP A PLATFORM THAT WOULD BE FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO DELIVER ANY TYPE OF ASSESSMENT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE ASSESSMENT LIFE CYCLE .