Page 8: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 2023)

Training Tips for Ships

Tip #43

Testing ...

What’s the Point? (Part II)

Copyright lamaip/AdobeStock n the previous edition of Training Tips for Ships, we edge of that fact to study only what they expect to be tested. made the point that assessment can never tell us whether Said another way, one core value of testing is the incentive it a candidate has all the knowledge required for a role or is can create for the trainee to learn as well as they can and as

Iable to perform the skills necessary under all conditions. much as they can. If they want to pass the test and they have

Instead, assessment is essentially an audit or sampling process no idea what is going to be on that test (i.e. they don’t know whereby we test a subset of skills or knowledge in the hope what items will be “sampled”), then they have no choice but that what we learn about that subset can be extrapolated to to study everything equally. This is the goal we are trying to all the required knowledge and skills. Understanding this core achieve - motivation to study as well and broadly as possible. truth about assessment creates a number of implications about If this is done, then learning is improved, and assessors can how we need to train and test for optimal performance. Let’s generally extrapolate the test results to those parts of the cur- discuss some of them here. riculum that were not explicitly tested - which is good.

One critical implication is that since we are not testing ev- Understanding this, we have to be very careful about our erything, we had better ensure that learners do not use knowl- assessment practices because it is easy to “break” the audit 8 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • January 2023

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