Ten years ago, the author worked as the Director of Assessments for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). For temporal context, the author arrived after the first of the infamous test cheating scandals and left just before the incident that spawned a second. Indeed, the author filled a new position created to both manage test security…

It has been argued in the literature on (language) testing that any act of testing/assessment can impact: (1) educators' curriculum design; (2) teachers' teaching practices; and (3) students' learning behaviors. This quality of any given testing situation or act of assessment has been called washback, or backwash if you will. Washback falls into…

The study investigates secondary students' attitude towards junior school certificate (JSC) examination in Bangladesh. The study is mainly quantitative and data was collected in a computable manner through questionnaires. Secondary students who would take the JSC examination were the main data source of the study. Two hundred fifty students (120…

The present study was conducted to find out preschool teachers' and principals' opinions on the problems of the Turkish education system as well as their opinions on potential solutions. The sample of the study was preschool teachers' and principals' from Alanya, a district of the province of Antalya, Turkey. In the study group, there were 89…

Grade inflation has been a consistently ignored problem in the public schools and universities for over fifty years. Grades keep getting higher and higher for a multitude of reasons. Students expect high grades. Parents demand high grades of their children and teachers. Some administrators implicitly or explicitly require that their teachers give…

Because of the large number of students involved, statewide assessments used throughout the United States are designed to be highly efficient with respect to administration and scoring. This constrains the formats that can be used and consequently limits testing to a subset of competencies typically associated with the education standards being…

There are few certifying or recertifying examinations in the medical field that are given in a take-home format. This stems from a concern that examinees may discuss items with peers, or save copies of items on the exam and then pass them on to others. This study examined if item exposure on take-home examinations influences the difficulty of the…