Altus Assessments

Altus Assessments creates and delivers robust assessments for academic programs to identify top applicants more easily and defensibly.

Our Approach:
At Altus Assessments, we strive to simplify the applicant assessment process, while simultaneously making it more effective.

We focus on high-throughput assessment methods to evaluate an applicant’s personal and professional characteristics. Current assessment methods for these traits are mostly unreliable and poor predictors of future success. In the medical profession alone, a lack of professionalism is a $50 billion (US) problem – accounting for 95% of complaints.

Our products are developed from over a decade’s worth of rigorous academic research on assessment methods for the personal characteristics critical to professional success. At Altus, we continue to refine our products every year with on-going research by top academics in the field. Our products have successively screened over 70,000 applicants since 2010, and we are on track to screen an additional 60,000 applicants in 2017 alone.

Our History:
Positive personal characteristics and professionalism are vital to have in high-stake professions, yet they are also the hardest to measure.

When admission tools that assess our abilities are unreliable and delivered in a non-equitable manner, we cannot truly know how applicants are performing. This fails applicants, academic programs, and our society as a whole.

These assessment issues drove co-founders, Harold Reiter, MD MEd (co-creator of the MMI Interview) and Kelly Dore, PhD, internationally renowned researchers in admissions and assessment, to formulate a series of fair and effective methods of selection. Their assessment methods are now used in a variety of prestigious professional training programs.

They began by conducting rigorous research to identify important personality and behavioural traits. From there, they developed testing and assessment methodologies to assess an applicant’s suitability to professions that require a great deal of empathy and emotional maturity.

Altus Assessments now offers this research-backed testing (CASPer® in particular) to schools as a turnkey, cost-effective way to allow applicants with the difficult-to-teach soft skills to stand out from those who perform well on strictly academic measures. We are committed to developing less resource-intensive, robust, and holistic tools to better predict student success, so programs can focus on developing the next generation of high-performing professionals.