Scholastic Testing Service, Inc. • Scoring and Licensing Policy

The established policy of Scholastic Testing Service, Inc. is to issue licenses, under our copyright, proprietary, and intellectual property rights, to allow the copying, reproduction, transcription, recording, storage, retrieval, and transmission of STS published, proprietary, copyrighted material for the purposes of scoring and reporting by machine and conducting research. STS proprietary material includes—but is not limited to—items, instruments, norms, answers, answer sheets, item-objective relations, reporting concepts and formats, tables, and statistical algorithms.

In conjunction with our responsibilities as a publisher serving the educational community, we strictly comply with those standards promulgated by the American Psychological Association for the development and norming of our standardized tests. We also have maintained the highest possible standards of research and quality control for our instruments. Our avowed objective is continued adherence to these standards in order to discharge our responsibilities to the education profession.

The reason for this licensing policy is to ensure that STS will be able to continue to develop high-quality test instruments. The royalty charges to be paid for the licensing privilege help defray the significant costs involved in new test development.

At present, licensing requirements do not apply to not-for-profit public elementary and secondary schools scoring and reporting their own cases. However, this policy of granting royalty-free, nontransferable licenses to not-for-profit public elementary and secondary schools is under continual review, and we retain the right to revoke it at any time without prior written notice.

All other entities including colleges and universities that score or report STS instruments to others or who wish to conduct research utilizing STS proprietary materials are required to request license issuance in writing and execute licenses bearing reasonable royalty charges or permissions fees. License issuance requests are not automatically granted, but rather considered in light of individual circumstance.