Press Release - July 17, 2006

Vantage Learning's MY Access!® Writing Program Aligns with Hampton-Brown High Point Series

High Point Level A, B, and C series, a highly-popular reading program for struggling readers and English language learners in middle schools, are now integrated with 59 new MY Access! writing prompts

Newtown, Pa., July 17, 2006 - Vantage Learning, www.VantageLearning.com, the world's leading provider of online essay scoring technologies and instructional writing tools, today announced it has released 59 writing prompts aligned to Hampton-Brown High Point Series in its latest version of the MY Access!® online instructional writing program. These new prompts—aligned by level, thematic unit, and the scope and sequence of Hampton-Brown's reading program—are available for immediate use.

MY Access! is based on Vantage Learning's IntelliMetric® engine, which uses a rich blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and the digitization of human expertise to accurately assess a student's competency and progress in writing. The program is recognized as the gold standard for quality and reliability in essay scoring.

Administrators can now select and assign writing prompts aligned to Hampton-Brown's comprehensive reading solution. This provides a valuable opportunity for students to further integrate reading and writing, and to write more frequently. Teachers can drill down on specific weak and strong skills by domain. Such highly prescriptive feedback and support develops student writing skills, and is critical for achieving adequate yearly progress (AYP) in writing.

"Vantage Learning listens to educators to help them meet the growing needs of their schools and districts," says Harry Barfoot, Vice President of Vantage Learning. "They have asked for specific writing prompts aligned with adopted reading programs and we have listened! For example, when a middle school teacher uses Hampton-Brown High Point Level A, there are five units with two themes. Each unit contains a writing project. If the theme happens to be 'community' or 'cooperation', an appropriate writing prompt within MY Access! can be assigned to make the student experience more rewarding."

MY Access! contains multilingual dictionaries, a thesaurus, word banks, spelling and grammar checkers, writing editors, multilevel tutoring, and other powerful tools to help students develop their writing skills. Students can write and revise their writing, and reinforce new skills through practice, while their interest in the subject is high. Students who are English Language Learners can select other languages as their feedback language, and receive additional tips on how to improve their English writing skills.

With the MY Access! program, students maintain their work in an online portfolio that contains their initial draft, evaluation scores, and subsequent revisions.

Similarly, teachers can review any individual student's portfolio, provide comments, and track the overall class portfolio to manage writing instruction.

"Vantage has a great relationship with Hampton-Brown, and this partnership is of high value to both organizations," commented Harry Barfoot. "We currently provide the underlying technology for Hampton-Brown Avenues e-Assessment (www.HBAvenuesvlp.com) program and look forward to building value for our mutual customers. Our expertise developing powerful online assessment platforms, intelligent essay scoring services, and rich instructional writing applications maps nicely to what Hampton-Brown's expertise is. It's a great partnership!"

For more information regarding MY Access!, please contact Harry Barfoot at HBarfoot@Vantage.com, or visit www.VantageLearning.com/myaccess.

About Vantage Learning

With over 146 million online test transactions last year, Vantage Learning is the world's leading provider of online assessment and automated essay scoring. Recognized as the gold standard for scoring quality, consistency, reliability, and scalability, Vantage Learning's award-winning education tools meet the needs of educators and school administrators, businesses and government agencies that need a comprehensive Internet-based test authoring, delivery, scoring, and reporting platform. Vantage developed IntelliMetric®, which administers and scores responses to open-ended questions over the Internet using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Vantage Learning's MY Access!® instructional writing program won a Codie Award in 2006 for Best Instructional Program: English/Language Arts – Secondary, was a Codie Awards dual winner in 2005, is a 2004 Award of Excellence winner from Technology and Learning Magazine, and Eduventures selected Vantage Learning as one of the eight most innovative educational technology companies.

Vantage Learning provides services across a broad spectrum of clients. The College Board, ACT, and the Graduate Management Admission Council® (GMAC®), all utilize Vantage technologies for college readiness and admissions. Oregon, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia leverage the Vantage Learning Platform™, the Student Progress Monitoring System™, and the Uniform Online Testing System™ for formative, summative, and computer adaptive assessments that drive instructional programs. Respected publishers like Hampton-Brown offer customized versions to support assessment linked to their proprietary content. School districts such as Los Angeles Unified School District, Red Clay DE, Milwaukee Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, and many other respected districts integrate MY Access! into their core language arts curriculum. Learn more at www.VantageLearning.com.

Hampton-Brown and High Point are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Hampton-Brown This announcement is neither an endorsement nor a sponsorship of the MY Access! program by Hampton-Brown.