WebXam is the online test delivery system for the Ohio Career-Technical Education Testing System. The WebXam system is the platform used to administer Ohio’s Career-Technical Education (CTE) statewide tests to students in qualifying career-technical programs. The tests are based on Ohio’s CTE content standards WebXam is owned and operated by CETE at The Ohio State University (CETE/OSU). The maintenance of the delivery system is funded by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE).
Ensuring that the CTE tests remain secure is of great importance in score credibility. This term refers to perceptions of the scores generated by the testing system as being reliable, valid, and fair to test takers. Everything that WebXam staff does is directed toward the goal of user friendliness and score credibility.
Reasons for test security include maintaining the fairness and validity of the tests. Test security is one of the major problems facing test developers and test users (for example, federal government, states, school districts, and teachers). Gregory Cizek, an educational psychometrician from the University of North Carolina, refers to cheating as the major problem facing testing as an institution. The term test security refers to actions that all stakeholders undertake to keep items “safe” so test takers can encounter them without narrow preparation and receive a fair test of their knowledge and skill. Narrow preparation means providing only the answer without teaching the broader competency units. The importance of test security in the CTE testing system stems from several reasons. First, compromised items cheapen the interpretations of scores because some individual test takers have a built-in advantage over others who have broad knowledge of the competency but lack the specific keyed answer. Second, a lack of test security decreases the chances that program improvement will succeed if used to pinpoint areas of the content standards that require additional instruction or an alternative method of instruction. Third, a lack of test security adds expense in the form of more frequent test revisions, costing taxpayers unnecessarily.