Questionmark Releases White Paper Titled “Defensibility and Legal Certainty for Test and Exams”

LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Questionmark?src=hash” target=”_blank”gt;#Questionmarklt;/agt;–Questionmark,
global provider of assessment technologies and solutions, today
announced the release of a 30-page white paper titled “Defensibility and
Legal Certainty for Test and Exams”. This paper documents best practice
in creating and administering defensible assessments that contribute to
legal certainty.

Legal certainty is a principle that the law and other rules should be
clear and precise. In the assessment context, legal certainty can be an
issue if an organization fails to follow its own exam regulations. There
have been many law cases in Europe and elsewhere where exams used to
select or recruit people have been attacked either because of a lack of
legal certainty or because the processes and procedures to create, score
and make decisions on the exam are not legally defensible.

This Questionmark paper gives examples of some of these law cases and
provides best practice advice to organizations who seek to make their
exam programs defensible and resistant to challenge on legal certainty
grounds. The guide is aimed at organizations creating and administering
tests and exams. It describes the principles and key steps to make
assessments that are defensible and that provide legal certainty, and
which are less likely to be successfully challenged in courts.

The key premise of the guide is that assessments have a “purpose” or a
“goal”, for example, the need to check a person’s competence before
allowing them to perform a job task. It is important that an assessment
program defines its purpose clearly, ensures that this purpose is then
enshrined in the design of the test or exam, and checks that the
assessment and delivery is consistent with the defined purpose.
Essentially, there should be a chain from the purpose to design to
delivery to decision, which makes the end decision defensible. If you
follow that chain, your assessments may be defensible and legally
certain; if that chain has breaks or gaps, then your assessments are
likely to become less certain and more legally vulnerable.

“We believe this guide is the first in Europe to address the issue of
defensibility and legal certainty,” said John Kleeman, Founder and
Executive Director of Questionmark. “We believe that for anyone working
with tests and exams, particularly in the workplace or in certification,
the guide will provide useful input to helping review a program to help
resist against potential legal attacks.”

Legal certainty (“Rechtssicherheit” in German) is an important issue in
many European countries, but less widely discussed in the US. The guide
explores defensibility and legal certainty in the area of assessments
from a broadly European perspective, nevertheless, it will also be
relevant in other regions.

This white paper can be downloaded HERE.

About Questionmark

Questionmark’s assessment technologies enable organizations to get
trustworthy results when measuring knowledge, skills, abilities and
attitudes for certification, workforce learning, regulatory compliance
and sales-force readiness. Customers worldwide rely Questionmark’s
award-winning platform for collaborative, multilingual item banking and
assessment authoring; delivery via mobile devices including smartphones
and tablets; secure, proctored exam delivery; and comprehensive
reporting and analytics.

Questionmark’s cloud-based assessment management solutions offer rapid
deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, available 24/7
support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited US and European-based
data centers. Questionmark’s flexible APIs and support of major industry
standards ensure interoperability with a variety of enterprise systems.

Complete details are available at https://www.questionmark.com.

Contacts

Kristin Bernor, Questionmark
(203) 349-6438
kristin.bernor@questionmark.com