Tech Skills Tested in New College Exam

At Whittier College and 62 other campuses across the country Saturday, students spent five grueling hours taking a test.

But unlike the SAT, LSAT or GRE, this exam was not required for admission to college or graduate school.

Instead, the newly devised test, called TekXam, was designed to prove that students who major in subjects like history and English may nevertheless be computer-literate and ready for jobs in high-technology workplaces.

“This is not about turning kids into technicians,” said Mark Warner, a venture capitalist and foundation official who helped create and launch TekXam for a group of private colleges and universities in Virginia. “This is about giving kids with broad intellectual grounding the tools they need to prove they can operate in the Information Age.”

So far, however, that credential doesn’t look like it will be easy to come by. In three rounds of testing, conducted over the past year at independent schools in Virginia and Maryland, only 30% of the about 300 students taking the test received a passing grade.

One of them was Kevin Hawkins, a 19-year-old Russian-language major at the University of Maryland, who took the pilot version of TekXam at a university computer lab in late July.

“I tell my parents and others I’m not going to go to college and major in something so that I can get a job that will pay well,” Hawkins said. “Hopefully this will make up for it and free me to study something I really love.”

Hawkins said his parents were “not crazy” about his decision to pursue Russian-language studies--and liberal arts generally--in college. Taking and passing the TekXam, he hopes, will satisfy their desire for him to have “a fallback plan” while pursuing a field that fires his intellectual passion.

Indeed, to those who devised TekXam, the test was, in part, an effort to shore up the value of a liberal arts degree in a world where advanced technical know-how has become a near-universal requirement for the workplace.

Warner, who chairs the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, said the idea for TekXam was born in early 1997, with Virginia fast establishing itself as a boom state for high-tech industry. Representatives of several of Virginia’s small private colleges and universities--all with large numbers of liberal arts students--began asking Warner how they and their students could tap into the industry for jobs and financial support.

The answer, Warner said, was to find a way to prove that students with liberal arts majors had salable computer skills and something that many graduates with technical degrees do not: an ability to communicate effectively, use information creatively and to manage complexity.

“We developed this to help connect our liberal arts students to new opportunities,” said Linda Dalch, president of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, “to help them credential skills that we thought they already had, but had no way of exhibiting.”

Thus began a unique collaboration among corporate human resources offices, the Virginia colleges’ career development specialists, and professors in technical fields from the schools involved. They decided, Warner said, that what they needed was “not a normal point-and-click computer exam, but something that could show critical thinking skills.”

AT&T;, which helped fund and guide the design of the test, has become a major supporter and endorser of TekXam, and high-tech giants like IBM and EDS Systems are exploring how they might rate passage of the TekXam in assessing job-seekers, Dalch said. “We obviously had developed a product whose time had come because people were hammering down our door to get to it.”

But some colleges are taking a wait-and-see attitude before signing on for TekXam. Robert Thirsk, career development director at Stanford University, said the test may be more important for some liberal arts students--and in some job markets--than it is for others. For that reason, Thirsk said, Stanford is considering whether to take part in TekXam’s pilot phase and offer the test to students.

Given the booming economy, where liberal arts graduates are as sought-after as business majors, a test to measure technological prowess may not seem timely.

“I’m not sure that Stanford students would readily accept it, or whether employers would readily feel they needed it in the case of Stanford students,” Thirsk said. “I think our students tend to be just a little above the cut in terms of technical skills.”

In three rounds of pilot testing on Virginia and Maryland campuses, the test had little trouble finding students eager to add a new credential to their resumes.

“It could open up a lot of doors, in all honesty,” said Todd Wirth, a 22-year-old chemistry major who graduates this year from Roanoke University in Roanoke, Va. “Businesses are going to look at it, since it was designed by their competitors. It’s a real-world test, and I figured it can’t hurt to have something like that on my resume.”