Certification exam development, as well as other credentialing like licensure or certificates, is incredibly important. Such exams serve as gatekeepers into many professions, often after people have invested a ton of money and years of their life in preparation. Therefore, it is critical that the tests be developed well, and have the necessary supporting documentation […]
NCCA Accreditation is a stamp of approval on the quality of a certification program, governed by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA).™ This is part of the Institute for Credentialing Excellence™, the leader in the world of professional credentialing. NCCA accreditation tells your certificants – and all stakeholders in your profession, including customers/patients – […]
The Beuk Compromise or Beuk Adjustment is a method for a “reality check” on the results of a modified-Angoff standard setting study. It is well-known that experts will often overestimate examinee capabilities and choose a cutscore that is too high – in some cases, so high that even the experts themselves would fail the exam! […]
The College Board announced in January 2022 that it was planning to finally migrate the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) from paper-and-pencil to computerized delivery. Moreover, it would make the tests “adaptive.” But what does it mean to have an adaptive SAT? What is the SAT? The SAT is the most commonly used exam for university […]
One of the primary goals of psychometrics and assessment research is to ensure that tests, their scores, and interpretations of the scores, are reliable, valid, and fair. The concepts of reliability and validity are discussed quite often and are well-defined, but what do we mean when we say that a test is fair or unfair? […]
Certification vs. Certificate: These terms might seem similar, but mean quite different things. Both of these terms here are a credential, which is an umbrella term. A credential refers to any type of supporting document/attestation that you have done something or know something, and includes simple things like a Driver’s License all the way to […]
Positive manifold refers to the fact that scores on cognitive assessment tend to correlate very highly with each other, indicating a common latent dimension that is very strong. This latent dimension became known as g for general intelligence or general cognitive ability. This post discusses what the positive manifold is, but since there are MANY other […]
Certification vs Licensure exams are two terms that are used quite frequently to refer to examinations that someone has to pass to demonstrate skills in a certain profession or topic. They are quite similar, and often confused. This is exacerbated by even more similar terms in the field, such as accreditation, credentialing, certificate, and microcredentials. […]
Certification exam administration and proctoring is a crucial component of the professional credentialing process. Certification exams are expensive to develop well, so an organization wants to protect that investment by delivering the exam with appropriate security so that items are not stolen. Moreover, there is an obvious incentive for candidates to cheat. So, a certification […]
A test battery or assessment battery is a set multiple psychometrically-distinct exams delivered in one administration. In some cases, these are various tests that are cobbled together for related purposes, such as a psychologist testing a 8 year old child on their intelligence, anxiety, and autism spectrum. However, in many cases it is a single […]
