SHL Group Ltd, as successors to PreVisor Inc, and now part of CEB, had a non-exclusive authorised reseller agreement covering GMA, the Graduate and Managerial Assessment series, and MOST, the Modern Occupational Skills Tests, starting in 2012. This is now being terminated. For extra customer convenience, we have opened an online shop for our paper products.
We have received numerous complaints about difficulty in getting information from SHL, reports of customers being told that the tests are shortly to cease publication, and particularly that SHL charge a substantial premium over and above the official list prices, despite being in receipt of a normal trade reseller's discount. Many customers have gained the false impression that SHL are the sole distributors of our tests. All of this makes for an unsatisfactory relationship, which we have decided to terminate.
GMA and MOST were originally published by the ASE division of NFER-Nelson, a company whose main focus was on tests for use in schools but which had, more or less by accident of history, become a near-monopoly supplier of occupational tests until the advent of SHL in the late 1970s.
NFER-Nelson was sold to Granada Learning around 2000 and ASE went into decline. NFER-Nelson was then taken over by the private equity group VSS and split up. The ASE division was sold to PreVisor Inc., supposedly including the publishing rights to GMA and MOST. However the permission of the copyright holder was not obtained for the sale of the rights to GMA and MOST and there followed three years of litigation.
Previsor soon was merged into SHL and disappeared from view, and now SHL itself has now become merged into CEB.
The next sentence in the original of this page was complained of by SHL's lawyers, so we have replaced it with some statements of facts accessible to any interested individual without reference to the outcome of the litigation. But if you are such an interested individual it won't tax your brain too much to work out which way the cookie crumbled.
Between 2008 and 2011, Previsor and/or SHL in whatever state of conjugation or otherwise, claimed to have exclusive publishing rights over GMA and MOST. Furthermore the copyright notices on these products were altered, without the permission of the author.
From 2012 the copyright notices reverted to their originals, and SHL had merely a non-exclusive reseller's agreement, which we are now terminating because of their unacceptable overcharging and other assorted delinquencies. All rights over these products now belong to PRD exclusively.
If all this is tortuous to read, it is as nothing compared with the lived experience.
We have terminated SHL's reseller agreement and set up an online shop with our printing and distribution partner X1 Ltd.
GMA and MOST will continute to be available in both print and online formats for the indefinite future. We intend to hold prices stable at their current level so long as production costs remain stable.
The paper version is now available through our online shop. The online versions are subject to additional restrictions over and above the Level A qualification required for the supply of the paper version. Please email us if you are interested in getting access to our online test suites. For GMA-online there is more information here.
