Have you ever volunteered on an ARRT exam committee? If so, you're very familiar with the concept of pilot items. The rest of us may have read about pilot items when we were students, but we probably haven't had to think about them for a while, and maybe they were a bit of an enigma even at the time. Let's learn more!
So, what are pilot items? When we're talking about exams, "pilot" can be either a noun (a new, unscored test question) or a verb (the process a new test question goes through before it becomes a scored item).
Following industry-wide standards in the world of certification exams, most ARRT exams include several pilot items. They are like the new kids in town-they're newly written questions that have never been on an exam before. Here's the important part: candidates don't know which questions are pilots, and they don't count toward the candidates' scores. This isn't to trick anybody; it's so ARRT gets an accurate picture of each pilot's difficulty. Imagine if you knew which questions wouldn't count toward your score. You might not put in the same effort, right? That's why pilot locations are unknown to the test takers.
Here's the silver lining for test takers: every test taker benefits from the efforts of test takers before them. Piloting new questions is crucial for developing excellent exams. It's part of quality control for test content. ARRT's Psychometricians, Exam Development Coordinators, and exam committee members carefully evaluate the performance of the pilot items before deciding to make them count. Pilots that don't make the grade are either revised and piloted again or thrown out and never used again. ARRT wants only the crème de la crème on the exam-the questions that truly assess the knowledge and skills needed for professional practice in the discipline.
Want to learn more about ARRT exam development? Read about How We Create Exams on the ARRT website, and also consider volunteering on an exam committee!
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