You probably noticed – and were probably a little confused by the new status values in our STUDENTS list.

We changed these values in preparation for our new billing system.

What used to be INACTIVE is now ARCHIVED/LOCKED.  As before, this is status that you set manually – either by selecting one or more students through the checkbox in the first column and then selecting the Action “Archive/Lock” from the top; or by editing a specific student (click on their student ID, then on the pencil icon). If a student profile is ARCHIVED/LOCKED that student can no longer log into their student portal and you can no longer grade a test for that student. That is exactly the same as was the case with INACTIVE. It really is just a name change.

What used to be ACTIVE is now either ACTIVE or IDLE. ACTIVE means a test was graded for that student within the last month. IDLE means a test was not graded for that student in the last month.

With the new billing system you are charged one ‘credit’ for an ACTIVE student. You can grade an unlimited number of tests for an ACTIVE student without incurring additional charges. If you are a customer who hasn’t upgraded to the new credit system (and we will honor our previous agreement, you are welcome to stay at your current plan for the next 2 years for sure) then you will still be billed for ACTIVE or IDLE (or in other words all students who are not ARCHIVED/LOCKED).

One of the main reasons for the new billing system is that we have a lot of customers who find it difficult to manage their students’ status (i.e. they forget to deactivate student accounts) or they want to keep the student accounts open so their students can still access their student portal and view their scores. Under the old system this mean you paid for each month that you didn’t deactivate a student account. With the new ‘credit’ system, you no longer have to manage students’ status. A student’s status goes to IDLE (=not billed) automatically one month after they went ACTIVE (due to a test being graded for them).

We would like all of our current customers to upgrade to the new ‘credit’ based billing system. Although you pay more for each credit we believe you will find that you end up saving, and not just in the long run, but immediately. A separate blog article will explain this in more detail.

Our intention was to provide you, our tutoring customer, the ability to offer diagnostic tests to schools or large groups of people without paying a full credit to have each test graded. But it became apparent very quickly, even before we had announced it, that there were at least two uses for this new feature:

1. Use it as a promotional tool (as we had intended it) or
2. Use it for your day-to-day business if your students aren’t taking more than one (1) test per month.

I will explain the second use in this article. A description of the using ‘diagnostic test’ grading as a promotional tool will be covered in a separate article next week.

Using ‘Diagnostic Tests’ for your day-to-day business to grade infrequent tests

If you grade tests using our system you will pay 1 credit for one month of unlimited test grading for a student. It’s a really good deal. But what if your student only takes one (1) test every 6 weeks or so? If you process their test as a ‘Diagnostic Test’ then you’ll only pay 0.5 credit for that test. And if you purchased at least 100 credits and received the 200 discounted diagnostic tests, you’ll only pay 0.1 credits. That is quite a saving!

Grading a ‘diagnostic test’ for a student who is already in your system is really no different than grading a test the ‘regular’ way. The one difference is the starting point.

For regular tests (1 credit = unlimited testing for one month) you can click on ‘Upload PDFs/TIFs of Scanned Answer Sheets’ from either the home page or from the TESTS page.

To grade a ‘Diagnostic Test’, click on ‘Setup a Promotional Diagnostic Test’ on the TESTS page.

Then click on ‘Grade Diagnostic Tests’. From that point on the process is exactly the same as when grading a ‘regular’ test.

Be aware: Grading tests as ‘Diagnostic Tests’ always incurs the 0.5 (or 0.1) credit charge.  Even students who would otherwise be covered by the the ‘unlimited grading for 1 month’ will incur a 0.5 (or 0.1) credit charge if their test is graded as a ‘Diagnostic Test’

Please note:

• ‘Diagnostic Test’ grading is only available to customers using one of CREDIT plans.
• Discounted diagnostic test credits do not ‘roll over’. They are tied to credits purchased with the ‘Credit Pack’, i.e. when you have used up the credits purchased with the Credit Pack, any unused discounted diagnostic test credits received with that purchase will expire.

In an effort to improve performance of our growing OnlineScoreTracker site, we are upgrading the server hardware.

This will lead to some service disruptions Tuesday, 4/18 starting at 8pm MDT.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

A quick run-down of features we are planning to add during the second quarter of 2017.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback (and patience). If you have any comments, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

• Moving site to more powerful server to improve response times (planned for Apr 10, 11pm MDT)
• Option for students to enter their responses into our online answer sheets via keystroke rather than selecting a bubble
• Ability to pre-slug answer sheets with student name and ID.
• Updated (more colorful) ACT and SAT reports
• Improved management of answer keys and category maps

and then we might already be spilling into the third quarter:

• Notify students via email that reports have been posted
• Mobile ACT and SAT reports
• BubbleScan Mobile (ability to ‘scan’ a paper bubble sheet using a smart phone)
• …

Premium keys for CollegeBoard’s SAT #5, #6, and #7 are now available.

Once these keys are installed in your OnlineScoreTracker account, student reports of tests graded using these keys will print with a detailed Test Question Breakdown on pages 2 and 3.

You can easily purchase the premium answer keys online through our web site:

Just find the key you want and click on the PREMIUM link.

If you haven’t already, you will also need to upload our list of categories and category groups. This is done through the KEYS menu. Select the rSAT categories then click ADD and click on the link to download our list of categories,  edit this file if desired and then upload it again to install it in your OnlineScoreTracker account.

If you need help, we can do this for you via our Key Installation Service.