Professional Testing, Inc.
Providing High Quality Examination Programs

From the Item Bank

The Professional Testing Blog

 

Recent Blog Posts

Scenarios in Testing: Five Tips to Improve Your Mileage

December 11, 2015  | By  | 

In licensing and certification tests, brevity is considered a virtue. Here’s the stem of a raw item that lacks this virtue.

The driver of a midsized sedan is pleased with the number of miles per gallon of gasoline the car consumes in highway conditions, but is unhappy with the amount of gasoline consumed in city driving. After changing the car’s oil and checking the tire pressure, the driver decides to look at the octane rating of the gasoline. Which of the following grades of gasoline is likely to provide the driver with the most economical gasoline use in city driving conditions?




Test Security Flowcharts

December 9, 2015  | By  | 

A test security flowchart is a visual protocol that is used to process anomalous (or aberrant) response vectors or incidents, and to do so in a consistent, controlled, unbiased way that contributes to the due diligence of assuring the integrity of resulting scores. By creating a flowchart for each recognized threat to a given program, anomalous or aberrant results can be processed consistently and fairly.




Avoiding (Bad) Discrimination in Licensing and Certification Tests

December 5, 2015  | By  | 

Testing programs are built to discriminate. Licensing and certification tests, specifically, class people into two groups: those who receive the credential and those who do not. The idea is to discriminate on the basis of relevant factors (“Does the candidate now have the knowledge required to perform the task at the required level?”) and not on the basis of irrelevant factors – whatever they may be.




Eight Tips for Reporting Failing Test Scores on Licensing and Certification Tests

December 4, 2015  | By  | 

For the people who take your test, after all the studying and stressing out, nothing beats getting a certificate with a shiny gold seal in your mailbox. That makes a passing score report fairly easy to design. It’s going to be a variation on “Hooray! You made it!”

Chances are, though, that not every candidate is going to get that letter. What are you going to tell the candidate who fails?

Here are eight pro tips:




Using Content Marketing to Attract Certificants

December 2, 2015  | By  | 

By: Natalie Judd, principal, Big Voice Communications

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is defined as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” It is one of the most powerful marketing tools that a certification organization can use to expand its influence, position the program as a thought leader, and attract more certificants.  Plus, by developing and sharing compelling content that is relevant to your audience, you are accomplishing two things: 1) positioning your organization as an industry resource, and 2) enhancing the customer experience – this is the one-two-punch strategy to build loyalty and ultimately a following. 




Equating Test Forms for Fairness

November 5, 2015  | By  | 

Co-authored by: Reed Castle, Ph.D. and Vincent Lima

Certification examination programs often have more than one examination form (set of questions, or items) in use at a time, and they require routine updates. The exam forms represent the same content, but have different items. As new items come into use, they may be easier or harder than the first set of items. As a result, exam forms can have varying degrees of difficulty. These variations need to be taken into account when reporting scores and pass/fail decisions over time and exam forms.




Avoiding a Third Best Outcome: The White House Weighs In On Smarter Occupational Licensure

October 29, 2015  | By  | 

Occupational Licensing’s Rise to Attention

In the United States, the post-1950 expansion of the service economy fueled policies by States to license specialized skill-intensive occupations in rationally uncontested areas such as medicine and law. Subsequent progressive social reforms such as the consumer activist movement of the 60's contributed to a public panglossian view of occupational licensure as a benevolent action enacted to protect them against unscrupulous, incompetent and unsafe providers of professional services. Legislators found little political reason to constrain proposals for licensure particularly when buoyed by the fact that licensing is principally self-funded through licensing fees giving it little if any impediment from budget or appropriation constraints.




What is “Certification?”

October 21, 2015  | By  | 

While conducting research for a journal article, I came across this definition of “certification”:

“Certification refers to the confirmation of certain characteristics of an object, person or organization.  This confirmation is often, but not always, provided by some form of external review, education, assessment or audit.  Accreditation is a specific organization’s process of certification” (Wikipedia). 




Test Security: A Look Behind the Scenes

October 14, 2015  | By  | 

Joy Matthews-López, Ph.D. Please give a warm welcome to our newest contributor to From the Item Bank, Joy Matthews-López, Ph.D.,... View Article




When to Use a Performance Test or an Alternative Assessment Method, Part II

October 7, 2015  | By  | 

This is a continuation of the previous blog article that discussed the use of performance examinations for certification and licensure.  To summarize the previous blog, performance examinations (i.e., “hands-on”) are expensive to use and maintain. Many certification and licensure authorities have abandoned hands-on performance examinations for some alternative measure of a person’s skills. However, there are situations where the expense and effort are worth the expenditure because of consequences to clients.  Situations where a performance examination may be worth the expense are those where failing to measure an examinee’s performance skills (fine motor) could result in pain or suffering for other people (e.g., patients).