In societies following a meritocratic ideal, educational certificates and examinations play a key role in allocating life chances to individuals. Procedures for allocating life chances need to be perceived as fair by those concerned if examinations and certificates are to possess legitimacy. This article traces and compares basic conceptions of…

Because of their global clinical utility, phonemic fluency tests are frequently incorporated into neuropsychological assessment batteries. However, in heterogeneous societies their use is complicated by the lack of careful attention to using letters of equivalent difficulty across languages, and the paucity of norms stratified by relevant…

The "Profile of Mood States 2nd Edition" (POMS 2) was published in 2012 by Multi-Health Systems (MHS) to assess transient feelings and mood among individuals aged 13 years and above. Evolving from the original POMS (McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1971, 1992), the POMS 2 was designed for youth (13-17 years old) and adults (18 years old…

The "Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Fourth Edition" (WPPSI-IV; Wechsler, 2012a, 2012b) is a comprehensive clinical tool, intended for assessing cognitive functioning among children aged 2 years 6 months through 7 years 7 months. Published by Pearson, the WPPSI-IV is an individually administered tool, to be used by…

The concept of assigning partial credit on multiple-choice test items is considered for items from ACS Exams. Because the items on these exams, particularly the quantitative items, use common student errors to define incorrect answers, it is possible to assign partial credits to some of these incorrect responses. To do so, however, it becomes…

Ultraorthodox men spend years studying religion and delay entry into the workforce until their early 30s. They then face barriers such as insufficient education and work experience, religious restrictions, and a lack of career information and self-knowledge. Although there is considerable interest in assessment, no measure has been validated…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for example, or…

The current main world university rankings broadly group the leading research universities of nations. Australia's Go8 universities are generally within the top 250 ranked universities, with several institutions in the top 50-100 on some measures. This recognition is commendable, however imperfect the individual rankings may be. Use is made of…

Two overlapping issues have given rise to this study: the need for assessment instruments to use with Spanish-speaking Latinos and the need for normative data on current and future Spanish-language instruments. Numerous career assessment instruments exist for the English-speaking population. These instruments may be administered on computer-based…

In order to extend the multicultural horizons of neuropsychological assessment in the Chinese mainland, a battery of eight commonly used neurocognitive tests assessing motor speed, verbal and visual-spatial memory, language fluency, attention, and executive functioning were given to 224 Mandarin-speaking school children (107 boys and 117 girls)…

Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent mental disorders among school-age children and can lead to impaired academic and social functioning (Keeley & Storch, 2009). Unfortunately, anxiety disorders in this population are often undetected (Herzig-Anderson, Colognori, Fox, Stewart, & Warner, 2012). The availability of psychometrically…

The present study was the first to examine the psychometric properties of the Korean version of the Behavior Assessment System for Children-2, Self-Report of Personality, College Version (K-BASC-2 SRP-COL), among a Korean national sample. Using 1,000 Korean college students, ages 18 to 25 years, we found support for the reliability (via internal…

With the concurrent emphasis on accountability, prevention, and early intervention, curriculum-based measurement of reading (R-CBM) is playing an increasingly important role in the educational process. This study investigated the differences in diagnostic accuracy and utility between commercial norms and local norms when making high-stakes, local…

In the context of an upper-level psychology course, even when students were given an opportunity to refer to text containing the answers and change their exam responses in order to improve their exam scores, their performance on these questions improved slightly or not at all. Four experiments evaluated competing explanations for the students'…

In the attempt to identify or prevent unfair tests, both quantitative analyses and logical evaluation are often used. For the most part, fairness evaluation is a pragmatic attempt at determining whether procedural or substantive due process has been accorded to either a group of test takers or an individual. In both the individual and comparative…