Avant Assessment

Avant Home
ABOUT AVANT
:: Overview
:: Message
:: Avant News

:: Partners

:: Focus on Users

:: Leadership

:: Career Opps

Message from the CEO

I wasn’t trained as a language educator or a test developer, so I’m often asked how I ended up starting a language assessment company. Well, learning a language – Japanese – changed my life, and I built my entire business career on it. At one time in my life, before Avant, I was an investigator of frauds, extortions and other crimes perpetrated against international corporations in Japan. It didn’t take long to understand that foreign companies with management who could only speak English, or German or French with their Japanese workforce were often hotbeds for these criminal activities. The few companies I visited on my sales calls that had bilingual foreign management and a culture of openness and respect for the Japanese never needed my problem-solving services. These companies saw language as a bridge, the others as a barrier.

To build strong bridges people need good tools. When we moved to Eugene, Oregon a few years ago my wife, Sheila, and I had a desire to work in the field of language education. We heard about the excellent work that Dr. Carl Falsgraf was doing building language assessments at CASLS (Center for Applied Second Language Studies) and saw what valuable tools these could be. Fortunately, Carl felt that we could help him place these tools in the hands of teachers and students who could really use them – and we created Language Learning Solutions, now Avant Assessment.

In these seven years, I’ve learned just how important good assessments can be in helping communication and bridge building. And, how not-so-good ones can help to preserve barriers. Good assessments measure students’ progress towards the goals that teachers want them to reach. They reinforce good teaching; they don’t distract from it. If “teaching to the test” is a problem, the test is a bad one. Good tests provide data on a common metric that stimulates discussion among teachers and helps to guide improvements in teaching and learning. Good tests are engaging, challenging and fun. They’re easy to access and are affordable. At Avant, we are blessed with a great team of skilled linguists, technology professionals, and creative test developers. We strive to develop and deliver assessment tools that will help you to build strong bridges. And we love what we do.

David Bong

Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Avant Assessment