Professional certifications need more than an assessment of simple understanding, but how easy is it to assess the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, namely Apply and Analysing and Evaluating.
The traditional approach has been either long essay or short questions with free text answers.
APMG moved away from this style of assessment about 15 years ago and developed a concept of objective testing. This approach was driven by the need to be able to assess in multiple languages and the opportunity to offer exams through an online system, which are now commonplace.
Why APMG uses objective testing
- The need to be consistent, as although people don’t challenge the fairness of everybody writing an essay, people do challenge the fairness of people being able to type an answer and those with a slower typing speed feel disadvantaged and we could find no way to remove this disadvantage of a personal skill.
- We also struggled to find a panel of multi-lingual examiners across a broad portfolio of products, so it was very challenging when we wanted to expand into new languages.
We developed an objective testing exam approach that includes five types of questions and enables us to assess a candidate at Blooms Levels 3 – 5. The Question types are classic, multiple response, matching, sequence matching and assertion-reason.
Writing multi-lingual exam questions for online testing
All our exam questions have been developed to meet the requirement for online testing platforms, which are now over 80% of our business, and to deal with multi-lingual papers in a fair and equitable way. The exam questions usually comprise a short case study or scenario, some of them have additional information. The candidate provides their answers either by checking a box, yes or no, or selecting the most appropriate option from a number of alternatives. This allows us to scale in both being able to deal with increasing numbers of candidates and in an increasing range of subject matter to be examined, so we have a consistent, scalable, and accessible approach which assesses comprehension and not speed of typing and enables us to minimise examination time, making it a less stressful experience for the test taker.
In the same way we don’t believe writing quality multiple choice examination questions is easy, writing objective exam papers is certainly not easy. Again, we have built our experience through thousands of hours of effort and believe we have a high-quality repeatable model.
If you want to assess individuals at a high level through a solution that is scalable, either online or offline, then I’m sure we will be able to help. For some inspiration check out the certification schemes on our APMG International website.
Learn about how we developed nine language exams for the APMG PPP Certification Programme or visit PPP-Certification.com
If you would like to talk to me about developing exams or a certification scheme please contact me - I would love to hear from you.