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Re: [Phys-l] Lecture Isn't Effective: More Evidence #2



Sounds like the Navy MOS test-prep unit isn't quite as advanced as that in the Army.
When I did a coupla years of statistical programming for the Army unit - we had a crew of PhD test psychologists who oversaw things. They kept the questions as 'fresh' as possible with new items each year with statistical analysis of each item. One of my routines identified 'Non-Functioning' Items, defined as those that were answered correctly by lower scoring testees and missed by those who faired better overall. (Sort of a self fulfilling definition??)

It sure beat being sent to 'Nam and I got good experience in both Assembler and Cobol.
An unbeatable combination of programming languages. ;-)
.
At 7:12 PM -0400 8/7/11, Hugh Haskell wrote:

This has been a problem with the Navy for many years. Promotions
among the enlisted ranks are heavily weighted by a multiple choice
test given every candidate for promotion (each test is specifically
tailored to the candidate's military specialty). In many specialties
for which there are fewer openings for promotions, the candidates
often study together for the exams, using collections of questions
from previous exams. What they do is assign two or three questions to
each candidate--that is, when they are about the take the test, each
candidate is expected to memorize two or three questions from the
test, and they get together after the test to combine the memorized
results, ending up with a virtually complete copy of the test. Using
this scheme, the candidates will have accumulated a large file of
actual test questions over a few years that they use to study for the
next test. Occasionally they get lucky, and someone in the
test-preparation unit gets lazy and just uses and old test.

This actually happened to some sailors who worked for me during my
Navy career. They opened their test and were shocked to see the exact
test that they had recently been studying. They were accused of
cheating on the test, but when they explained the circumstances, they
were cleared and someone at the test prep unit got axed instead.