Digital system (SaaS) for the national certificates of language proficiency (NCLP) in Finland

The main object of the procurement is a digital system that enables the creation, maintenance, assessment, and production of results for the Finnish national certificates of language proficiency (NCLP) examination. This procurement only concerns the Finnish and Swedish language examinations, which account for approximately 95% of all the NCLP examinees (currently ca. 10,000 per year across all NCLP languages). It is expected that procurement agreement can be made before the end of 2025 and that concrete work can start immediately after that. There will be a transition period in 2026 during which the digital system is prepared for operational use. The new digital examination for Finnish and Swedish should be launched in August 2026, which means that the system needs to be ready for the launch by the end of June at the latest. The reason for the purchase of a digital system for the NCLP examination is that the National Agency is preparing for an increase in the number of examinees for the Finnish and Swedish language tests due to the current Government's programme that has several goals related to immigrants’ command of the two national languages. One of these is the requirement to demonstrate proficiency in Finnish or Swedish as a condition for granting a permanent residence permit. In addition, a possible future language allowance for labor market support is also expected to increase the number of examinees for Finnish and Swedish. Thus, the current number of examinees (close to 10,000 per year for Finnish and Swedish) is estimated to rise significantly. Due to the upcoming changes, the University of Jyväskylä / Centre for Applied Language Studies and the National Agency have agreed on amendments to their mutual agreement on the production by CALS of the NCLP examinations and on the examination system as a whole. The new system must be able to exchange information / data with the existing digital system (the NCLP tool) owned by the University of Jyväskylä / CALS. The NCLP tool was developed to (semi)automatically exchange information with the national Opintopolku (Studyinfo) system owned by the National Agency; Opintopolku is used for registration purposes by the examinees and test centres, and for the examinees to retrieve their digital certificates after the exam results are ready. The best solution in the future will be that the new digital examination system interfaces with the NCLP tool at CALS rather than with the Opintopolku system. The main reason for this is the rather complicated nature of the examination registration procedure for which reliable and smooth data exchange processes between the NCLP tool and Opintopolku have been developed over the years. The system includes an assessment tool (as part of the NCLP tool) for human rating of speaking and writing performances, and open-ended comprehension items. Tenderers can choose whether they want to make a bid that utilizes the existing digital components of the NCLP or not. In any case, participants' performances must be transferred as automatically as possible from the test administration tool to the assessment tool. The features of the assessment tool are described in more detail in Appendix 2. The user interface language of the test delivery tool can be selected/modified to Finnish, Swedish, or English.The (software) service must be produced and its personal data processed within the EU/EEA. A more detailed description of the procurement can be found in Appendix 1 "Description of the Procurement". The mandatory requirements for the system can be found in the appendix 2. “Minimum requirements”.