In the category of Assessment and Testing on the National Counselor Examination (NCE), the Counselor Preparation Comprehensive Examination (CPCE), or another counseling exam, you’ll want to have an idea of the various testing formats that exist.
This video is jam-packed with topics. You’ll find information on subjective and objective tests, free choice and forced choice assessments, and normative and ipsative tests to name a few. We’ll also discuss the differences between speed and power tests. Other terms such as spiral and cyclical assessments will be covered, and we’ll be introduced to horizontal and vertical tests.
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Whether you’re taking the NCE, the CPCE, or another counseling exam assessment and testing can be a very challenging section of these exams that can be really confusing, have lots of terms or otherwise just be challenging to wrap your mind around. This video is going to go more in-depth on some of the different formats in testing and some of the different terms that you may hear or that might be helpful to know on your exam. My name is Keegan. I recently graduated with a master’s degree in counseling. I’m making these videos to help people prepare for the NC, the CPC, or other counseling exams.
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As I said earlier, assessment and testing can be a very challenging section on these exams. So being able to interact with that content in different forms, like reading it, listening to it, watching it, all of these different formats that you can take that content in and absorb it will help it stick in your mind just a little bit better for when you’re taking your exam. To begin, I think the first thing that we should do is talk about what test formats are or what I mean by that. So when we talk about testing formats, we’re talking about how the items of the assessment are presented to you.
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So as you know, our tests are not the same and don’t always operate in the same way. That’s kind of what we’re talking about with this. So we’re going to talk about what are some of the different ways that tests can be administered and what are the terms that are associated with those. So as we go through this, you’ll hear me use some different terms like the test taker and the test score. The taker is obviously the person who is taking the assessment, who’s completing or answering the questions, whereas the scorer is the person who is scoring that assessment, who’s going to be giving the grade or who’s going to be determining the result of how the test taker did on that assessment.
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The first term that we come to then related to testing formats is a subjective test. So with a subjective test, results of this are largely based on the scores interpretation. This means that how someone does on the test is going to be largely based on the test scores report or opinion. In some cases. This can be problematic because in some cases we may see something like the halo effect happen, which is where someone does better on the assessment, not because they actually did better on the assessment, but because of some other factor where they’re considered to be more positive.
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A lot of times this might refer to someone’s more attractive appearance rather than actually doing better On the assessment an objective test then is more of the opposite of a subjective test. With an objective test, the score is opinion doesn’t affect the outcome of the assessment. When we think of a short answer essay test, that’s more subjective because someone’s going to have to read through that short answer essay and determine how someone did on answering that question. However, a multiple choice assessment is more objective
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The person who scores an objective multiple choice test, their opinion doesn’t really matter. They’re just looking for whether the person chose the right answer of the choices available. So if we think about subjective tests, they leave much more room for error because someone’s opinion is involved. However, with objective tests, like multiple choice, there’s less room for error and there’s less room for someone to have to make judgment calls.therefore the outcome is going to be less influenced by the score moving along, you may hear on your NC, CPC or other counseling exam, the term free choice when it comes to assessments.
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If an assessment includes a free choice answer, this would be something like a short answer essay. In other words, the person who’s taking the test has more free choice in how they answer it. They can choose what words they’re using or how they’re explaining how they would answer your question. Another term for this is a free response test because the person taking the test has more room to explain or more room to provide information related to their thinking about an answer. This will often mean that the assessment doesn’t have one right answer to it.
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Therefore, free choice answers are more subjective. They may leave more room for error. However, they also provide the person more room to explain what they need to explain in order to try to get the answer correct. Another downside, though, of free choice exams is that they do take more time and work to score. On the flip side, then we have forced choice assessments. These may also be called recognition items, and these are assessments that have sent answers that someone has to choose from. The NCE and CPCE are both examples of forced choice assessments.
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So with things like the NCE, the CPCE, that multiple choice format gives people two or more answers that they have to choose from in order to answer the question. In some cases you may hear of a forced choice answer as being dichotomous. This means that there’s going to be two options to answer the question that are going to be on opposing sides. It might be something like yes or no or true or false. These would be dichotomous answers because they oppose each other. Next, let’s talk about the term normative.
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When we use the term normative, this largely means that the answers or the answer to an assessment is being compared to others who have taken the assessment. Also, you may hear that somebody scored in the 60th percentile and in that case they would be taking a normative assessment because their assessment how they did on it is being compared to how other people have also done on this assessment. When we think of normative assessments, something that is a good example of this is personality tests. A personality test is comparing how one person does on the assessment and is comparing it to other people who have also done the same assessment.
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Therefore, we’re trying to measure that person’s personality by comparing it to the assessments of other people and their results and how they’ve done in the same test on the other hand we have ipsative assessments. These are tests that compare one person’s results to their own results from an earlier administration. In other words, with ipsative assessment there, there’s no benefit in comparing one person’s assessment to another person’s assessment. Instead the benefit is comparing that person’s assessment
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to a previous time that they took that. Another way that we could talk about this is if someone took an assessment to measure their level of depression and then came back months later and took the same assessment measure their level of depression and they scored lower the second time. That assessment would be ipsative because we’re seeing that from one time to the next. They’re doing better. Depression wise, they’re measuring lower on depression. However, we don’t get as much information by comparing it to other people. You may also hear about speed and power tests. So let’s talk about those are
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with a true speed test, the challenge of this assessment would be the speed. Ideally, a true speed test is going to have questions that are actually pretty easy to take. However, the person should not be able to finish that assessment in the time that’s given. They should not be able to answer all the questions that are available. So in other words, the difficulty is not supposed to be with the questions that are given to the person, but instead the difficulty is supposed to come from the time factor of that assessment. A timed test is actually considered an example of a speed test. However, with a time test,
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most people will actually finish the assessment in the time that’s given, and the questions for a time test are likely going to be more difficult than in a true speed test. So if we look at the NCC and the CPC, these are actually both examples of timed tests. Now, a power test that is supposed to measure a person’s mastery or level of mastery in a specific area of content. So a true power test would not have a time limit, And with a true power test, nobody should be able to receive a perfect score. Next, let’s talk about another form of assessments that you might hear about,
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which is equivalent form or parallel form exams. The idea with these is that they are interchangeable forms of a test. It’s important that these assessments have statistical components that are the same. For example, the mean and the standard error should be the same. How an equivalent form assessment would work is that a group would be given the same test. But if that group were to actually talk about their assessments, they would be getting different versions of it that are measuring the same thing and whose scores would mean the same. Now we’re going to move into the last few terms that we have on this video related to test formats.
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So if you found this video helpful so far, please help me out by giving the video like and subscribing to the channel. If you hear about a spiral test, this means that the test is getting more difficult. The further you get into the assessment. Think of a spiral staircase. The higher you climb up on that spiral staircase, the more difficult it’s going to be getting. As you get more tired. So the spiral test will work the same way. The further you get into the test, the more difficult the questions will be. A cyclical test, then, is similar.However, the test will be broken up into sections
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within the first section. The questions will be all the same difficulty level. As you get into the second section, those questions will be more difficult than the first section. And the questions in the third section will be then more difficult. Then the second section. However, in each section the questions are all at the same level of difficulty. It’s just that from section to section the questions become more difficult compared to the previous section. Next, you might hear about vertical tests. If you hear about a vertical test, what a vertical test is,
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It has versions of the test based on different factors. For example, a different age group or a different education level would get a different version of the assessment. Then we have horizontal tests. A test battery is an example of a horizontal test. What a horizontal test does is it tries to measure multiple concepts in one administration of the exam. So horizontal exams may measure things like math, science and English all in one administration. So that brings us to the end of this video. I hope that you found it helpful. If you have any questions related to test formats,
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please leave them in the comments below. Or if you have ideas for future videos, please let me know those also.
