We describe here the development and validation of the Academic Career Readiness Assessment (ACRA) rubric, an instrument that was designed to provide more equity in mentoring, transparency in hiring, and accountability in training of aspiring faculty in the biomedical life sciences. We report here the results of interviews with faculty at 20 U.S.…

College instructors in the United States usually make their own decisions about how to design course exams. Even though summative course exams are well known to be important to student success, we know little about the decision making of instructors when designing course exams. To probe how instructors design exams for introductory biology, we…

While it is clear that better teachers get better results with students, school leaders often put themselves at a disadvantage by not hiring the best teachers available. In this groundbreaking book, three human resource experts show how even small adjustments can help school districts' leaders, principals, and other human resource professionals…

The design, administration, scoring, and results of the 1993 New York State Correctional Captain Examination are described. The examination was administered to 405 candidates. As in previous Sergeant and Lieutenant examinations, candidates also completed latent image written simulation problems and open/closed book multiple choice test components.…

In this article the author put forward some relatively novel ideas about the nature and purpose of tests and examinations. (Editor/RK)

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) decided to explore alternative examining procedures for positions covered by the Administrative Careers with America (ACWA) examination. One requirement for new procedures was that they be automated for use with OPM's recently developed Microcomputer Assisted Rating System (MARS), a highly efficient system…

Four discussions of test construction based on item response theory (IRT) are presented. The first discussion, "Test Design as Model Building in Mathematical Programming" (T. J. J. M. Theunissen), presents test design as a decision process under certainty. A natural way of modeling this process leads to mathematical programming. General…

An overview of the system analysis approach to evaluation and the psychometric models currently proposed to evaluate Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title I projects is presented. It is argued that, in America's Pacific possessions, the sole use of the systems analysis approach to evaluation fails to provide adequate information to…

Responses of 310 teachers in Florida to a survey about use of teacher-made tests, nationally standardized tests, and state minimum competency tests were studied. Results show that all three test types were used to some extent in eight decision categories, but none of the tests were clearly dominant. (SLD)

The issue of test-item selection in support of decision making in adaptive testing is considered. The number of items needed to make a decision is compared for two approaches: selecting items from an item pool that are most informative at the decision point or selecting items that are most informative at the examinee's ability level. The first…

This paper discusses how to determine whether a test was developed in a legally defensible manner, reviewing general issues, specific cases bearing on different types of test use, some evaluative dimensions, and evidence of test quality. Tests constructed and used according to existing standards will generally stand legal scrutiny. (SLD)

This paper outlines the results of a test validation project for entry-level positions in the tufting areas in a carpet factory. Carpet factory administrators thought that new methods of hiring associates would help improve overall system productivity. A job analysis was conducted through review of job materials and focus groups with employees and…