Gatekeeper courses such as Anatomy and Physiology are often referenced in discussions regarding the national shortage of persons in allied health professions. In an attempt to bolster access to STEM professions, some community colleges are mandating prerequisite courses such as Natural Sciences and/or General Biology for STEM gatekeeping courses.…

The determination of Pass/Fail decisions over Borderline grades, (i.e., grades which do not clearly distinguish between the competent and incompetent examinees) has been an ongoing challenge for academic institutions. This study utilises the Objective Borderline Method (OBM) to determine examinee ability and item difficulty, and from that…

A common practice in some certification fields (e.g., information technology) is to draw items from an item pool randomly and apply a common passing score, regardless of the items administered. Because these tests are commonly used, it is important to determine how accurate the pass/fail decisions are for such tests and whether fairly small,…

The objective of this study was to determine the degree to which recommendations for passing scores, calculated on the basis of a traditional standard-setting methodology, might be affected by the mode (paper versus computer-screen prints) in which test items were presented to standard setting panelists. Results were based on the judgments of 31…

Whether anchor item sets varying in difficulty and discrimination affect precision of cutting score equivalents generated through judge rescaling as much as equivalents from score equating was studied with 4 groups of experts and 250 and 1,000 examinees. Results indicate the robustness of judge rescaling and its superiority over equating. (SLD)