The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare the pre- and post-pandemic ultimate and first-time pass rates for physical therapist assistant (PTA) candidates taking the National Physical Therapy Exam (NPTE) during the COVID-19 era in the U.S. This study builds a framework for future qualitative studies to understand factors leading to any…

Background: Teacher quality matters for student achievement (Coleman, 1968; Rivkin et al., 2005; Rockoff, 2004; Aaronson et al., 2007) and later career success (Chetty et al., 2014). States use licensure exams as a quality screen believing that they are predictive of teaching effectiveness (Council et al., 2001). However, the evidence on the…

In a targeted double-scoring procedure for performance assessments that are used for licensure and certification purposes, a subset of responses receives an independent second rating if the first rating falls into a preidentified critical score range (CSR) where an additional rating would lead to considerably more reliable pass-fail decisions.…

Test scores are often used to make decisions about examinees, such as in licensure and certification testing, as well as in many educational contexts. In some cases, these decisions are based upon compensatory scores, such as those from multiple sections or components of an exam. Classification accuracy and classification consistency are two…

Administrative problems such as computer malfunction and power outage occasionally lead to missing item scores, and hence to incomplete data, on credentialing tests such as the United States Medical Licensing examination. Feinberg compared four approaches for reporting pass-fail decisions to the examinees with incomplete data on credentialing…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, correlational study was to determine if there was a correlation between first-time pass rates on the USMLE Step 1 and the use of active learning strategies in medical school classrooms. For the utility of this study, active learning strategies were defined as any activity in which medical…

Students who have graduated from nursing school and licensed nurses have a formidable responsibility to provide quality and compassionate nursing care to their patients. However, after graduation, nursing students must study very hard in the hope to pass the National Council License Examination (NCLEX). In recent years, Atlantic Technical College…

The use of linguistic features in school assessments, as well as the impact of these factors on the outcome of assessments have received limited attention in the literature. With this study I aimed to analyse linguistic features of accounting examinations. A quantitative technique, using tests for correlation, was employed to analyse the Grade 12…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to provide an initial analysis of variables including academic courses, demographics, and clinical experience used as predictive measures of board certification achievement. With the growing need for perfusionists due to an increase in cardiac procedures and retirement, first-time pass rate on board…

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between institutional control and NCLEX first-time pass rates during 2017-2021 for BSN, ADN, and LVN programs in the United States while controlling for school and program level characteristics. The study included five years of data gathered from nursing regulatory agencies and the Integrated…

This article studied two methods to detect mode effects in two credentialing exams. In Study 1, we used a "modal scale comparison approach," where the same pool of items was calibrated separately, without transformation, within two TC cohorts (TC1 and TC2) and one OP cohort (OP1) matched on their pool-based scale score distributions. The…

Adequate education experiences and passing licensure examinations are imperative to professional entry and the career success of aspiring barbers. This improvement science initiative addressed low passing rates on the North Carolina Apprentice Barber Licensure Exam (NC ABLE). The initiative aimed to equip students with the knowledge and skills to…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to compare mean first-time pass rates on the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) of nursing graduates who were trained in hybrid versus traditional prelicensure nursing programs in California from 2018 to 2023. A theoretical framework in constructivism connects this…

The purpose of this ex post facto quantitative study was to examine the correlation between the scores of preservice teachers on 240 Tutoring STR practice tests and their scores on the actual STR exam and to explore the extent to which test preparation programs predicted performance on certification exams. In addition, this study compared the…

A vast body of studies has a propensity towards considering system admission test (SAT) scores as one collective variable that influences the licensure examination performance. The current article revisits this research area and further takes a step forward in analysing the influence of SAT score grouped into two categories as passed and…