When students fail an examination at the end of their first year, they are offered a resit examination, which they merely need to pass to progress into the second year. These resits anecdotally provide a dual purpose of testing that students have achieved the required level of attainment to progress, and incentivising additional effort. This paper…

Scores are the most visible and widely used products of a testing program. The choice of score scale has implications for test specifications, equating, and test reliability and validity, as well as for test interpretation. At the same time, the score scale should be viewed as infrastructure likely to require repair at some point. In this report…

More attention is currently being paid to the distractors of a multiple-choice test item (Thissen, Steinberg, and Fitzpatrick, 1989). A systematic relationship exists between the keyed response and distractors in multiple-choice items (Levine and Drasgow, 1983). New scoring methods have been introduced, computer programs developed, and research…

Standard setting practices in states using the NTE (formerly the National Teacher Examinations) were examined for 1987. The NTE is composed of two segments: (1) a Core Battery covering the communication skills and general knowledge skills; and (2) a test of professional knowledge about teaching. The processes used to establish passing scores for…

Procedures for establishing the cutoff scores for the occupational competency exams administered to individuals graduating from Pennsylvania vocational teacher education programs were reviewed. A total of 595 National Occupational Competency Testing Institute (NOCTI) Exams administered in 43 occupations or trades at three colleges between the…