Maintaining the integrity of the testing process is extremely important so no one gains special advantages by having improper access to test questions. 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.”

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 content of the exams. In 2007, NurseTesting began using a new assessment design methodology that meets the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978).

In an effort to heighten NurseTesting’s assessment security, the newly validated Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy job knowledge assessments will no longer display incorrectly answered questions on the assessment results page. Following the release of the Physical and Occupational Therapy assessments, a comprehensive Critical Care and Perinatal Suite of assessments, subjected to the rigourous validation process, will launch soon.

James S. Ostmann, Sr RN, MBA, Chief Nursing Officer for Amistaff Healthcare Technology states,

“With the release of NurseTesting’s updated and new clinical assessments, we have elected not to display the missed questions in order to protect the integrity of the test items. Releasing clinical competency assessment content to subscribers or test takers, in essence, nullifies the reliability of the assessment. Hence, the knowledge, skills and/or abilities the assessment was designed to measure and the inferences drawn from those results are meaningless once the assessment content has been compromised.”

For this reason, testing organizations such as NurseTesting that value the reliability and validity of the employment-selection process must take proactive measures to prevent the widespread dissemination of their testing content.