From: Michael Dowling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : Please do elaborate. It seems to me that making the items public allows for : greater numbers of editors and testers, since there is no longer any need to : keep them secret while doing so. I don't have time to elaborate fully (nor spell-check) and this is a hypothetical discussion because of the other difficulties I outlined in my long previous email. But, hypothetically, let's take one example. What if I only memorized a few questions and they appear on my exam. for those questions, my exam score reflects my Linux ability and some error (regardless of my ability, I got those items right). And notice that the error is always "positive". Under this model, there is no "downward" force so the net effect is always to get a little higher score. So this would introduce a bias into the test scores. Even if it were small it would be bad, and I see no reason to assume it would always be small. In fact, I think it would vary, some people would be much advantaged and others not at all. This is a psychometrician's nightmare... tests should measure what you test as much as is possible excluding other factors. A test publisher's job first and foremost, is to reduce bias and error in the scores of it's exams. Furthernore, one cannot randomly select items unless they are equivalent. If there is variation in difficulty, for example, then random selection would give some people harder tests and other people easier tests. But you would hold them to the same cut-score. Does that seem fair? No, it seems ametuerish. What you have to do is to pre-calibrate the items so you know how easy or hard they are. And that means intensive study of each item.. so an enormous pool would be enormously costly (in resources, not necssarily money). I described this in my last post. Besides, even if training companies were not involved, don't you think that publishing our items would turn our test into a test of one's ability to memorize (instead of on'e Linux skills)? Isn't that exactly what we DO NOT want certification tests to do? I certainly hear people complain about this influence all the time about all certification exams. I think, again, it's our job to remove this component as much as possible. Finally, for what purpose? I don't think we are constraioned about who can provide items. Didn't we decide that there was no prohibition? So this is a solution seeking a problem. I think it flows more from a sense that things should be open (like Linux). I agree whole-heartedly with that attitude and I love open-source; that's why I volunteer for LPI. But that analogy simply doesn't make for exams like the one we're discussing. So those are a few quick thoughts. I invite couter-arguments if I've missed something. -Alan Mead -- This message was sent from the lpi-examdev mailing list. Send `unsubscribe lpi-examdev' in the subject to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to leave the list.
