Research Cell Article

With the emerging flow of globalization, the necessity of a common linguistic mode of conversation has increased many folds over the past few years. English has been accepted as the universal language in most parts of the globe, with India ranking second in the list of nations with highest English speaking people. In today's educational and corporate sector, the need for effective communication has been recognized and accepted more than the technical knowledge.

Keeping in mind the increasing demand and vital role of the English conversational skills in almost all the sectors, and a vision to bring credible and genuine assessment for the same, Aspiring Minds launches India's first adaptive speech assessment test for employability called - SVAR.

SVAR is a telephone based, automated evaluation tool which provides a fair, consistent and a completely automated way to scientifically assess a person's English speaking, listening and comprehension skills. This provides a method to filter and interview suitable candidates by not only increasing interview convert rates but also significantly reducing bad hires and increasing overall quality of talent.

The test can prove beneficial in the hiring process of various corporate sectors like BPO's, Banking, Front Office Jobs, Client Sales and Servicing, Voice Trainee Jobs, Tele-callers and other jobs requiring excellent communication skills.

SVAR Delivery and Integrity

SVAR comprises of some unique delivery features providing breathtaking scalability in both Indian environment and globally.

• Telephone based where multiple candidates can take the test simultaneously by just dialing a phone number from anywhere in the world.
• The candidate has to go through the authentication process via IVR and then proceed with the test.
• Ensures simple delivery by including sufficient amount of instructions and providing appropriate time to understand and respond to a question.
• If a call is dropped due to low network facility, the test can even be resumed from the same point where the candidate left it previously.
• Some other features to ensure the integrity of the test include authentication of candidate by entering a valid registration id, ids with the expiry date prevents its use after completion of the event,  restriction of simultaneous test attempts with the same registration id.

Various sections of the test are being adaptively delivered, i.e., the level of the next question to be delivered is decided dynamically based on the candidate's response. If a candidate answers correctly to a question, the difficulty level of the next question is raised or vice versa.

Traits Measured

SVAR evaluates and provides scores to the candidates on the following traits:

Content Design and Development

SVAR consists of various sections to evaluate one's speaking, listening and comprehension skills.

• Read and Speak: the candidate is required to read and speak sentences of varied length and difficulty levels.
• Listen and Repeat: the candidate is required to listen and repeat sentences of varied length and difficulty levels. These sentences are spoken by multiple speakers with varied voice pitch, accent and gender.
• Listening Comprehension Passages: the candidate is required to listen to a passage and answer to questions based on it. The passages include both conversation and descriptive passages. The questions are fact based, inferential and intuitional in nature.
• Extempore Speech: the candidate is required to speak impromptu on a topic for 45 sec.  He/She is provided 30 sec to think about the given topic.
• Grammar and Vocabulary: the candidate is required to answer multiple choice questions. The questions are based on usage of tenses, prepositions, articles, synonyms, antonyms, usage of words etc.

The sentences for Read Speak and Listen Repeat section are chosen on the basis of length (number of words and phonemes), difficulty of phonemes, phonemes coverage, inclusion of phonemes which are mispronounced due to particular regional or mother tongue influences (for example, 's' is spoken 'sh' in North-East India,  'a' is spoken 'ya' in South India, etc) and easy comprehensibility of sentences.

SVAR Scoring and Validation

The scoring for SVAR is powered by Aspiring Minds' robust Adaptive Testing engine which does a multi dimensional assessment of the candidate abilities using advance statistical and AI algorithms. To measure every trait accurately, separate models have been designed for every trait. For the training sample of the model, candidates were rated by multiple experts such as:

• Speech and Language Pathologist(Linguistic Expert) with more than 30 years of experience
• A BPO Trainer with 7+ years of work experience
• Voice Trainers with around 10 years of work experience.

The scores provided to candidates are based on standard rubrics accepted throughout the world.

• The English Language Proficiency score follows the CEFR Standard (Common European Framework of References for Languages).
• Pronunciation and Fluency Rubrics have been adapted from Second Language Elementary, Oregon Department of Education, February, 1995.

Fig 1: The figure shows how the components of the scoring process for various traits.

All the output traits are predicted / measured with a very high accuracy rate. The output accuracy can be observed in Fig 2.

SVAR is India's first adaptive automated test which assesses the communication skills of the candidate with a very high accuracy rate. The test is standardized, reliable, and valid and also ensures high integrity by providing unique registration id and test ids. The test can be taken at any place by just dialing a phone number. The scores can also be obtained through phone.