Psychometric Services
However mystifying and unpronounceable psychometrics seems, it's just a way to refer to the processes that make your tests fair, sound, and interpretable. At Proexams we provide you with the psychometric support and services you need, for any stage in your assessment cycle. As well we help demystify the process, so you can trust your candidates are being evaluated fairly, and your organization can have confidence in the results.
The Assessment Life Cycle
The Assessment Life Cycle is a way of describing the various processes that are fundamental to creating a psychometrically sound assessment program. ProExams offers a full suite of psychometric consulting services, for any stage in the cycle.
1. Defining Purpose and Creating Specifications
So, you're a member of an organization that needs a new certification exam, or to revise an existing one. You know what it takes to be a competent and successful professional, but how do you build an exam to find out if your candidates know?
ProExams helps you to find out! First, we help you to clarify the purpose of your exam, and to take an inventory of the abilities, skills, and knowledge that you want your candidates to have mastered. Then we help you to turn that inventory into a blueprint for an exam, a blueprint that has clear specifications for the numbers and types of items, the relative emphasis of the different content areas, the cognitive complexity of those items, and a plan for how to author, assemble, and analyze the test's performance.
2. Filling Your Item Bank
Following from the JTA, detailed requirements can be worked out for the types and quantities of test items that are necessary for the establishment of your tests and the maintenance of your testing program. Enter ProExams’ Item Bank.
With our Item Banking service, you can author your items to precisely target your test blueprint, then tag the item with the appropriate characteristics such as content area, cognitive level, item statistics, even whether the item features a male or female! With this capability, you can ensure that the items you author are precisely targeted to your own needs while still taking account of other characteristics that might introduce bias into your assessment. You can also put into place a timeline for creating these items throughout your testing cycle and check in with the progress of your item development efforts.
3. Assembling Your Test
Hand-assembling a test to match your blueprint is difficult work. You may succeed in creating a test that has many of the right characteristics, but often at the expense of other aspects of your blueprint. For example, you might represent the various content areas in the right proportions, but have too many ‘straight recall’ items. Or you might have too many ‘C’s as correct answers. Or the difficulty of items within one content area might be different from another.
ProExams uses sophisticated test assembly software to pull the right items from your item bank in order to fulfill your test blueprint precisely, fairly. The completed test is instantly available for you to validate, not create. You can even use our tools to swap out particular items, allowing you to perfect your assessment.
4. Test Administration
Online test administration is ProExams’ bread and butter. However, currently under development are some tools that allow sophisticated functionality for test takers and administrators alike. Stay tuned!
5. Item & Test Analysis
A comprehensive analysis of the performance of your tests and the items that comprise them is essential to ensuring the effectiveness of your assessment program, as well as to the fair evaluation of your candidates. As one of ProExam’s core services, this analysis is focused not only on providing your organization with the most pertinent statistical indices, but also gives you specific and easily interpretable information about the strengths and weaknesses of your tests and items relative to their intended goals.
After all, while you might be curious about knowing what a biserial correlation or conditional reliability is, you’re probably much more interested in knowing how your test is doing its job, and the specific steps you can take to make it even better.
6. Standard Setting
Distinguishing between competent and not yet competent candidates is the rationale of testing programs in the licensure / certification space. Standard Setting is the process by which a passing score on an exam is established and validated.
ProExams can facilitate this process for you, helping your experts efficiently and effectively identify a legally defensible passing score for your exam. In addition, we can conduct this process either in person or on the web with your subject matter experts participating from around the country, or the world.
