By Andrew Stafford
Andrew is NCIDQ’s Exam Manager, who oversees everything about the program from the first draft of an exam question to the publishing of the final scores. In this role, he answers a lot of questions about the exam. We asked him to share with us the questions that he hears all the time and provide some advice related to those questions. He should know, he’s a Certificate holder, and he tells us he remembers vividly what the exam experience was like.
NCIDQ monitors blogs and discussions and talks to a lot of exam candidates who take outside prep classes for the exam. What they always ask me is, “How am I supposed to pass the exam when the questions on the actual exam were not anything like the ones I got in my prep class?”
It’s important to understand that NCIDQ develops and administers the exam. It is the “NCIDQ Exam.” Other organizations develop preparatory programs. These are two separate activities, and knowing that will help you understand who does what in this process.
NCIDQ volunteer committee members who develop the NCIDQ Exam are not permitted to be involved in exam prep activities, and likewise, people who develop and teach prep courses are not involved in the NCIDQ Exam. NCIDQ volunteers must attend a comprehensive training in the science of creating questions (“psychometrics”) so that the questions are all fair and relevant to the practice analysis that is the exam blueprint. In order to comply with industry standards, NCIDQ does not review outside companies’ test questions or prep materials to see how (or if) they relate to the actual exam.
We often hear complaints about the “trick” questions we put on the exam, and like all professional licensing examination programs, it’s absolutely false. First of all, it would violate the testing standards and render our exam invalid or indefensible, and second, the public is not protected by a “trick” question. The public is only protected when an interior designer is able to adequately demonstrate his or her competence. That is the purpose of the NCIDQ Exam. It is 100% health, safety and welfare. No tricks or hidden agendas.
Multiple-choice questions are given a trial run as unscored questions on exams before they are first scored on an exam. Some never make it. After each exam, our testing consultant, ACT, performs a series of statistical studies on the performance of each question as it relates to each candidate. If a question—whether scored or unscored—performs poorly, it is removed from the pool of test questions, and if necessary, it is not scored. For example, let’s say that a disproportionate number of people miss question 18 on Section 1. We know that is statistically impossible if the question were doing its job. So we throw out that question completely and we do not factor it into the final score. This ensures that we maintain fairness to the candidate and reliability to the public.
Many things and many hours of work go into a question that you see on the examination. If what you see on the exam seems different from what you saw when you were practicing, it is probably due to the differences in how NCIDQ develops exam questions and how others prepare them. If you want to see NCIDQ’s sample multiple-choice questions, you can take a practice test.
The practice test will tell you what the answers are, but it won’t tell you why one answer is right and why is wrong. Want to know why? We’ll tell you here.
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