Testing the professionals:
This year, 200 Pearson professional testing centres opened
for business across the US. Each year 150,000 aspiring
nurses will take their professional examinations in our
centres, which provide an accessible and secure environment
for online testing. Now the centres are open, we're aiming
to make them the testing home for many other professions.
Adding up:
Pearson's Higher Education publishing business
took the emergence of the internet as an opportunity to
extend its leadership and attack one of its big competitors
- the market for second-hand textbooks. My Math Lab, an
online learning environment dedicated to improving student
performance in mathematics, is a good example. It provides
homework in multi-media instructions for 66 of our Higher
Education maths titles and we're adding more. Students are
able to log on using access codes, which they only receive
when they buy a new textbook. Professors use the site to
tailor material to their particular teaching needs. This
leading-edge technology helped the Higher Education
publishing business to grow well ahead of its market. We're
launching similar products in economics, psychology, anatomy
and physiology in 2003.
A fair deal for investors:
The FT's asset pricing business,
IDC, is set to benefit from one of its most exciting new
products. IDC discovered that a structural inefficiency
within US mutual funds was costing the funds $4bn a year.
Their investments in overseas markets like Japan were valued
at the end-of-day prices - even though there were
circumstances in which, if stock markets elsewhere in the
world rose sharply while Japan was sleeping, it was a
statistical certainty that Japan would re-open higher too.
Arbitrageurs were taking advantage of these ?stale' prices
and making significant profits. So IDC created a service
called Fair Value Pricing - to come up with more accurate
values for overseas securities. The product is being
trialled with 50 of the world's largest financial
institutions and we're helping the industry solve a problem
that they weren't even aware of. We're now developing a
range of follow-on products and ideas that our methodology
can be applied to.
Making its mark:
Millions of students depend on Pearson as they sit their
school tests and exams. In 2002, our educational testing
business renewed two of its largest statewide contracts -
California and Ohio - and won six new state contracts and
the Department of Education's nationwide test of student
progress. This business is poised to benefit further as the
US Government has passed a law requiring all 50 states to
test every 8-13 year-old in reading and maths every year.
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