Test Reliability and Security

It is extremely important the integrity of the testing process be maintained so that no person may gain a special advantage by having improper access to the test questions. A 2007 report by the Association of Test Publishers’ indicated that many certification test centers reported that more than 60 percent of their tests had been stolen or compromised.

The Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology, one of the nation’s premier testing-expert organizations, says “public disclosure of the content and scoring of most selection procedures should be recognized as a potentially serious threat to their reliability, validity, and subsequent use.” Also, the International Guidelines on Computer-Based and Internet Delivered Testing, published in 2005 by the British Psychological Society, says that test publishers should “protect sensitive features of the test from illegitimate disclosure.” James S. Ostmann, Sr RN, MBA, Chief Nursing Officer for Amistaff Healthcare Technology further states, “Releasing clinical competency exam content to subscribers or test takers, in essence, nullifies the reliability of the exam. Hence, the knowledge, skills and/or abilities the exam was designed to measure and the inferences drawn from those results are meaningless once the exam content has been compromised.”

This is extremely important since a test score based on cheating is, by definition, not valid and therefore should not be used for selection purposes. One way to minimize potential threats to test security is to limit the number of opportunities in which the test’s integrity can be compromised. This includes minimizing the number of people who have access to the contents of the exam. For this reason testing organizations, such as NurseTesting, that value the reliability and validity of the employment-selection process actively prevent the widespread dissemination of their testing content.