Ensuring that the Ohio Career-Technical Education Testing System assessments remain secure is of paramount importance. Reasons for test security include maintaining the fairness and validity of the assessments. 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 University of North Carolina, refers to this problem as the major problem facing testing as an institution. The term refers to actions that all stakeholders undertake to keep items “safe” so that 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 broad competency units.
The importance of test security in the testing system stems from several reasons. First, items that are compromised 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 makes added expense for the Ohio Department of Education and the Center on Education and Training for Employment in the form of more frequent test revisions. Fourth, the expense of the revisions is borne by the test user (ODE) but is eventually passed on to users in the form of test pricing.
For more information about Test Security, please visit our Test Security Rulebook.