The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a cheating prevention strategy employed for a professional credentialing exam that involved releasing over 7,000 active and retired exam items. This study evaluated: 1) If any significant differences existed between examinee performance on released versus non-released items; 2) If item characteristics could explain any found differences; and 3) If the release of the items caused any changes in the item's difficulty. The results suggest that examinees' performance on released items is not meaningfully different from their performance on the non-released items and that this security strategy may increase the fairness and validity of test score interpretation by reducing the motivation to cheat.