MeritTrac plans to invest Rs 20-cr to up offerings

When the IIMs decided to award the contract to Prometric for conducting the Common Admission Test (CAT) online, and Pearson bringing its assessment brand to India, it must have been a wake up call for MeritTrac, a large assessment company. But, the company is not losing sleep.

“There is space for at least five major players, and for different price points,” said Madan Padaki, co-founder and CEO, MeritTrac. The company is now investing on expanding its offerings and will invest around Rs 20 crore over the next three years on developing products that cater to different industry segments. For instance, the company is in the process of developing automated evaluation tools for spoken English that can help BPOs conduct tests. The company says it is working on 10 new projects which will be rolled out over the next few months.

It has been developing scaleable business models where its own infrastructure is not a constraint and it will use computer terminals of educational institutions. It can now assess upto 150,000 candidates a day. It’s education assessment system was used for the Gujarat Common Entrance Test conducted by the Gujarat Technological University.

From assessing candidates applying for jobs in companies, the firm has been gradually moving more towards the education sector. It is now concentrating more and more on conducting online entrance examinations for universities. It’s a huge opportunity, adds Padaki.

With its service offering, Pariksha, a technology platform that helps in the examination delivery process with some 50,000 computer terminals across 185 cities, it believes it is in a position to provide large-scale examination delivery — both for the education sector and conduct government/PSU exams.

With Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Human Resource Development, recently announcing a plan to move as many exams as possible online, it has given a shot in the arm to companies like MeritTrac that offer platform in holding online tests and assessments. The list of exams slated to go online is growing longer. The number of examinations, including those conducted by Union and state governments, include 250 million test papers every year. But, of these barely half a million are online. One major set of examinations, in terms of its scale, expected to go online in future is the Railway Recruitment Board’s exams. This would mean testing some 50 million candidates every year.

Among its most ambitious of projects may be the tool it is developing to evaluate descriptive examinations. The use of technology, said market sources, would help improve the quality of the process of evaluation and rid the evaluation of much of the subjectivity and disputes over awarding of marks and the consequent demands for re-evaluation. The technology exists for this, said the company.