The admissions assessment that learns your school.
RISE measures the cognitive skills career college students actually need — then, every term, tells you which of them predicted who finished. And changes accordingly.
Book a walkthrough$5 / applicant
Per applicant — not per assessment. Retakes are free. No tiers, no setup fee, no annual contract.
What does $5 get you? Keep reading — or skip ahead and book a walkthrough.
At its core, a cognitive assessment — built for career college students.
RISE is a configurable admissions assessment built for career colleges. At its core, it’s a set of cognitive questions designed specifically for career college students — measuring the skills their programs actually demand. From there, you add only the layers your school needs.
Pick the assessment that fits your programs
RISE Core
The standard RISE assessment.
- Reading comprehension
- Quantitative reasoning
- Information literacy
- Procedural reasoning
Best for — more advanced programs
RISE Fundamentals
The same assessment, at a foundational level.
- Reading comprehension
- Quantitative reasoning
- Information literacy
- Procedural reasoning
Best for — entry-level programs
Same four areas, either way — Fundamentals fits entry-level programs, Core fits more advanced ones.
How RISE gets better at your school.
Every term, the instrument gets sharper.
You assess your applicants. At the end of the term, you tell us who’s still enrolled, who left, and who finished — a spreadsheet you’re already producing for your accreditor, or a direct connection to your SIS.
That’s when RISE stops being a test and starts being your test.
Your dashboard shows what actually happened — 30, 60, and 90-day success, retention, graduation — broken out by campus and by program. Where students are falling away, and where they aren’t.
Measuring is the easy part.
Any school can correlate test scores against completion. Run the numbers on a fixed, off-the-shelf assessment and you may well learn that it doesn’t predict much about your programs — and then you’re holding an expensive confirmation of a problem you can’t fix. The test came in a box. The only move left is to slide the cutoff up or down and hope.
RISE is different because we built the questions. When the data tells us something, we can act on it.
What acting looks like
Reweighting
Once graduation data is in, we look for the questions that actually separated finishers from non-finishers in your programs — and shift the weight toward them. The total stays the same. Your passing line doesn’t move, and last year’s cohort is still comparable to this year’s. The scale is identical; the instrument is more accurate.
Training, targeted
If early leavers share a specific weakness, we can route applicants into focused modules on exactly that, before they enroll.
Program-level bars
Programs differ. If one is losing students at 30 days who cleared the bar comfortably, the bar may be in the wrong place for that program.
New questions
Sometimes the answer isn’t new weights — it’s that something your programs demand isn’t being measured yet. When that happens, we write and validate the questions, and they go through the same test as everything else.
Every one of these points at the same target: does the assessment predict who finishes. Nothing else.
A team, not a dashboard.
Every school’s data tells a different story, and none of this is automatic. We read your results with you and tell you what we think they mean — and we only recalibrate when the data can actually support it. A recommendation we can’t defend isn’t worth making.
You’ll see something after your first term.
RISE doesn’t need years of data to be useful. It needs one term.
Term one
what happened
Report your outcomes and the picture arrives immediately: 30 and 60-day success, retention, broken out by campus and program. This is the term where you find out where students are actually falling away. Not why yet — where.
Term two
what’s holding
90-day success enters the picture. Retention becomes a trend instead of a snapshot. The patterns you couldn’t be sure of after one term either hold up or don’t.
As graduates accumulate
what predicts
Completion data is the one worth waiting for. It’s what lets us look at your questions and find the ones that separated finishers from everyone else. That’s the first calibration, and it’s when the assessment stops being a national instrument and starts being yours.
We’d rather tell you that than imply the assessment arrives already tuned to your programs. It doesn’t. No assessment does — the difference is that ours changes.
Add only what your school needs.
The cognitive assessment stands on its own. Each of these layers is fully optional — turn on the ones that fit, all covered by the same $5.
Persistence & Readiness
OptionalThe cognitive assessment tells you whether an applicant can do the work. Persistence & Readiness tells you whether they’re likely to finish it — the part a skills score alone can’t see.
Persistence
Demonstrated drive and follow-through. It draws on how applicants have actually handled effort, setbacks, and commitments — not on how they rate themselves. Because it’s behavioral rather than self-flattering, it’s much harder to game.
Readiness
How prepared the applicant is to step into the program itself — their grasp of what it takes to succeed as a student, study habits, and academic mindset. A measured part of the score: preparedness for the work ahead, not outside circumstances.
Two applicants with the same cognitive score can have very different odds of finishing. This layer surfaces that difference before enrollment — so you can admit with confidence, or put support in place exactly where it’s needed.
Training
OptionalMost assessments stop at a yes or no. Training turns a near-miss into a path forward.
When an applicant falls just short, RISE can route them to focused modules targeted to the exact areas they need to strengthen — not a generic course, but the specific skills their results flagged.
Your school decides what completion means. You can admit applicants who finish the training — treating the effort and follow-through as the signal you needed — or, if you prefer, have them take the assessment again afterward.
Completing training before enrolling does two things at once. It closes the skill gap — and the effort itself becomes a signal: an applicant who works through the modules is showing the willingness to learn and the persistence to follow through.
Online Readiness (ORA)
A separate assessment that gauges whether an applicant is set up to succeed in an online or hybrid program — the self-direction, habits, and environment online learning demands.
Pre-assessment questions
Short, unscored questions that surface outside-the-classroom pressures — financial strain, work schedules, childcare, and the like — so you can spot practical barriers early. They inform your decision; they don’t affect the score.
Custom questions
Add your own — for the Support Check-In or anywhere else you want to hear from applicants directly. Like pre-assessment questions, they’re unscored and don’t affect results. The scored assessment stays research-based, because it’s the thing we validate against your outcomes.
That $5, in full.
Everything included
The $5 covers either RISE Core or RISE Fundamentals, every optional layer you add — persistence & readiness, training, online readiness, pre-assessment, and custom questions — plus all retakes. The outcome dashboard and recalibration come with it.
Pay only for what you use
Billed monthly, based on usage — you’re charged only for the applicants you assess. No setup fees, no upfront license, no annual contract.
What you’ll see in the walkthrough
A short, no-pressure look at RISE and whether it fits your programs.
RISE in action — the assessment and the results an advisor sees.
The outcome dashboard — your scores against retention, early success, and graduation.
Which assessment fits your programs — Core or Fundamentals.
Reporting your outcomes — exactly what we need from you, and how you’d send it.
How to get started — at your pace, no commitment.
Book your walkthrough
Pick a time that works for you — we’ll take it from there.
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