“When Naomi Menikoff started dataMetrics Software in 1994, student assessment was not as critical an issue as it has become these days. Back then, many districts administered standardized, national tests. ‘The assessments took valuable time out of instruction, results did not get back to the districts for many weeks, and the results were hardly used,’ says Naomi. ‘The teachers typically did not do anything with the information,’ she says. Now, a lot of that has changed—dramatically. Here, Naomi shares why.

Victor: Why did you create dataMetrics?
Naomi: I had both a teaching background as well as 10 years working in education-related software. One of the packages I sold had to do with a way to process standardized tests locally with a Scantron-like machine. That appealed to me because at least with local processing, districts could get the results immediately – and save money. But that particular product was getting very old.

By 1994, the Windows platform was ubiquitous and the product was still running on DOS and Apple. The company that owned the program (Tescor) saw that their product had reached the end of its life and wanted to get out of the business. They had support commitments to existing customers and were happy to have me take over that responsibility. They knew that my goal was to create a replacement product that would run under Windows.

I had a background in both teaching and software sales to educators, but I was not a programmer. Fortunately, my husband, Arthur is a mathematician (with university teaching credentials) and was working for a defense contractor who was offering time off without pay while waiting for some government contracts to come in. So it was really opportune. Arthur took a few months off to get the basic structure of TestWiz designed and programmed. We did not simply convert the Tescor product into Windows. We took the idea that we wanted to provide local scanning and scoring and created a new product, TestWiz, from scratch—to run under the latest Windows platform. We had a replacement product available within one year for the 50 some odd districts we were supporting. The districts were willing and eager to switch to a Windows platform.

So to answer your question, I created dataMetrics because there was an opportunity to start a business at a very low cost that had an existing customer base and served the education market in what I perceived a useful way.

Victor: What does the name mean?
Naomi: Arthur came up with the dataMetrics name—since we are helping educators measure data. We had to add the Software part, since the name dataMetrics was already taken by several other companies.

Victor: What about the TestWiz name?
Naomi: I came up with that one. It relates to the fact that we are dealing with tests and that we make it easy.”  **

For more of the article click here.

To learn more about TestWiz click here or contact us at software@testwiz.com



**  By Victor Rivero, EdTech Digest, May 3, 2011