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The important mission
Since the Young Marines’ beginnings in 1959 with one unit, the organization has grown to 238 units with more than 6000 youth and over 2100 adult volunteers. Currently, the organization operates in 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Japan.
The Young Marines Program is a national non-profit organization for youth 8 years through completion of high school. The program strengthens the lives of America's youth by teaching the importance of self-confidence, academic achievement, honoring veterans, citizenship, community service and living a healthy, drug-free lifestyle. We focus on character building, leadership and being a productive member of society.
Susan Righthouse
Executive Officer, Miramar Young Marines
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Image source: https://youngmarines.org
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 made the team quickly realize that Young Marines would not be able to meet in person anytime soon. It was a critical aspect of their program because the things like close order drill, field skills and land navigation were hands-on activities.
Using a combination of Zoom and Google, I set up online classes for Young Marines to stay involved with the program. At that time, I was not using any testing programs. It was primarily to keep the kids involved in the program, so they didn't lose interest and to keep them away (or lessen the time) from online games.
Susan Righthouse
Executive Officer, Miramar Young Marines
More and more Young Marines nationwide
Word quickly spread about the online classes, and more Young Marines were quickly joining them from units outside of Susan’s area. By September 2020, she was interacting with nearly 1300 Young Marines nationwide who wanted to stay engaged with the program while their units were unable to fulfill their needs.
At the same time, Young Marines started falling behind in their sign-offs, and units were afraid they would start losing the kids in their teams. Sign-offs are critical to Young Marines being able to progress to the next rank.
Young Marines are completely merit-based. If they don't do the work, they don't get promoted. Typically, there are between 60 to 85 sign-offs per rank required (in addition to a few other requirements) before the promotion to the next rank, unlike scouting, where their youth are promoted to the next level based on their age or grade in school.
Susan Righthouse
Executive Officer, Miramar Young Marines
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Image source: https://youngmarines.org
Addressing the challenge
The sudden transition to online learning came with a lot of pre-planning and logistics. The Executive Officer was wondering how they could successfully and honestly sign off the requirements, knowing that there needed to be integrity involved in the testing process.
By this time, kids who were taking all of their schooling at home from a computer were pretty savvy in test taking and how to make everything an open book test. Fortunately, there were ready-made solutions which had been prepared by Testportal for such an occasion.
Testportals' Honest Respondent Technology, along with being able to set time limits to each test, was definitely the key to our success over the last couple of years. Since we began using Testportal, over 950 tests have been taken nationally. Quite frankly, these are all kids that would probably have not gotten their sign-offs and promoted without the use of the Online Rank Specific Training and the Testportal.
Susan Righthouse
Executive Officer, Miramar Young Marines
By combining the ease and integrity of the system with results reliability mechanisms, Testportal became a Young Marines ally that made it possible to continue their mission. With testing process automation, there is more time to work with Young Marines and promote new members' development.
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