The Board of Trustees (BoT) is charged with fiduciary oversight of the ACS Examinations Institute. The Board serves the Division by providing advice and consent on large scale projects and budgetary matters of the Institute and serves as a sounding board for the Director of the Institute on legal matters that may affect the finances of the Institute.
We are happy to report that ACS Exam Institute business sales are greatly recovered from pandemic levels. There are still areas where we expect to see a further recovery at the end of this spring semester. In 2023, the Institute saw about $800K in sales, which is still shy of the approximately $1M in sales of 2019. However, the trend continues to increase from the $470K in sales in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
In the last year the Institute has released new exams both for organic and general chemistry and we now expect to be back on regular release cycles for these levels (with full-year and single semester exams). Additionally, we have other exams in trial phase; including General Chemistry Full Year, Instrumental Analysis, General/Organic/ Biochemistry (condensed GOB) exam, and Polymer Chemistry.
The Institute is expanding the materials it offers in test preparation. In addition to the Study Guides that we have in general, organic and physical chemistry, the Institute is also increasing its offering of practice exams and tutorial exams. We have just released a new product for classroom use by instructors to assist students in preparation. Materials for first-term general and organic chemistry were released in fall with second-term and full-year general and organic chemistry slated for release and use this spring.
Our online presence is indeed growing as we develop these new study materials and the Institute to develop its e-commerce site as well improve our sales of Study Guides on Amazon.
At this point the move of the business office for the Institute has been completed. Our new address is: 1375 S. Garfield Ave. Loveland, CO 80537. However, all methods of phone and electronic contact remain the same.
The Institute continues to expand its portfolio of study materials for students based upon the feedback from requests from our community. Additionally, the Institute is developing better methods for norming exams to help faculty users in better understanding the outcomes of student performance. The new norming methods also help in the further development of other testing products that are on the horizon. What this means for users now is that many more of our exams are normed with a release of ten new sets of norms just this February.