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In most of the world, system-wide education tests are based on common standards and curricula. Teachers align their instruction, and students their study, to them. Most of these tests have consequences and, typically, are placed at the entry and/or exit points of levels of education. Most countries require both upper secondary exit and university entrance examinations as well as either lower secondary exit or upper secondary entrance exams.

In the United States, however, where education governance is more fragmented, common standards and curricula have been difficult to implement and enforce. In the place of standards-based (criterion-referenced tests) tests, many U.S. states and school districts purchased norm-referenced tests from commercial test publishers. The "norms" were constructed through field tests with national samples of students on a generalized curriculum of the publishers' own construction. In the absence of standards-based testing, aptitude tests were often used to make consequential decisions, such as assigning students to special programs, retaining them in grades, awarding them scholarships, or admitting them to selective schools or universities.

The courts, however, have since declared it unfair to impose negative consequences, such as retention in grade or diploma denial, on students who fail tests based on pseudo-curricula rather than the one to which they actually were exposed. This principle has since been written into the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which have become the de facto regulations governing legal uses of standardized tests in the United States. As a result, virtually all grade promotion and graduation examinations are now standards based, not norm referenced, and achievement, not aptitude, tests.

Standardized tests evolve through a demanding and time-consuming process based on either classical test theory or item response theory. In classical test theory, every test is custom designed and relevant to a particular population. First, one develops a test content framework, or outline, and then validates it with reviews by experts or current job holders. Next, one drafts test items and field tests them with a representative sample of the test-taking population, which can be difficult to do without exposing that population to the test content.

Test development according to item response theory (IRT) requires large populations of test takers to produce reliable test statistics, but these statistics are not then dependent on any particular choice of respondent samples. Moreover, respondent scores are independent of any particular choice of test items. Computer-adaptive testing (CAT) owes its existence and its increasing popularity to IRT. With CAT, test takers are presented an item at a level of difficulty determined by their performance on the previous item. Correct responses yield more difficult subsequent items. Those responding to all items correctly can finish the examination early by circumventing the need to respond to the less difficult items.

Bibliography:

1) American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education. 1999. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education.

2) Association of American Publishers. 2006. "Standardized Assessment: A Primer." Washington, DC: Association of American Publishers.

3) Downing, Steven M. and Thomas M. Haladyna. 2006. Handbook of Test Development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

4) Hambleton, Ronald K., Hariharan Swaminathan, and H. Jane Rogers. 1991. Fundamentals of Item Response Theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

5) National Organization for Competency Assurance. 2005. "The NOCA Guide to Understanding Credentialing Concepts." Washington, DC: National Organization for Competency Assurance.

6) Phelps, Richard P. 2003. Kill the Messenger. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

7) Phelps, Richard P., ed. 2005. Defending Standardized Testing. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

8) Phelps, Richard P., ed. 2007. The Anti-Testing Fallacies. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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