Written By: Dennis Maynes, Chief Scientist, Caveon Test Security Lately, I have been bemused by reports of “cheating investigations” which have uncovered “pervasive test fraud” in school systems throughout the country. The investigations were data-mining enterprises which found anomalous data. [Data mining is the intensive review of a large amount of data looking for “interesting” [...]

Written By: Dennis Maynes, Chief Scientist, Caveon Test Security Last Sunday, a team of journalists at the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) published a series of stories describing a gain-score analysis that they had conducted with the intent of uncovering cheating in schools. There were 69,000 schools from over 3,000 districts represented in the analysis. The [...]

Written By: Dennis Maynes, Chief Scientist, Caveon Test Security The Reader’s Digest had a humorous anecdote in the January 2012 issue. A marine recruiter helped a color-blind recruit memorize the order of the colors on the test to help him pass the physical. When shown the test page during the physical exam, the young man [...]

The Association of Test Publishers (ATP) Conference of 2008 ended yesterday. As always, it was a good conference. In 2004 we stated, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Being a sponsor of the conference, we placed a bag of M&M’s (i.e., manage and measure) in each attendee’s conference packet. And, we printed the message [...]

Today is the first day of the annual ATP Conference (Association of Test Publishers). This afternoon I will present a workshop titled, “Strategies and Tactics for Limiting Item Exposure.” We will be exploring innovative ideas for protecting tests and items from theft. It’s easy to understand why test publishers are concerned about test theft. High-quality [...]