Page 9: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 2023)

The Author

Goldberg

Murray Goldberg is CEO of Marine

Learning Systems.

Email: [email protected] effect, removing the motivation to study broadly and render- ing useless any conclusions about those items we did not test.

There are many common testing practices that break the audit effect entirely.

One such example is giving the same test to multiple learn- ers. Doing so will create an incentive in them to share the test details, removing their incentive to study broadly and our ability to extrapolate. The end result is they know less, and we know less about what they know.

Another great way to break the audit effect is to allow for exams to be “open book”. An open book exam will provide you with information about whether the candidate was able to ? nd the answers to the questions on the exam (and may even teach him or her the answers in the process), but will provide no information about knowledge and skills not present on the exam. The only valid reason to give open book exams is to test the candidate’s ability to successfully ? nd information - so if that is your goal, they can be a good choice.

A third example of how to break the audit process is to allow repeated taking of an exam, especially with little or no required time interval in between. Ef? cient trainees will quickly determine that the fastest way to pass the exam is to take it over and over until they manage to achieve a passing score. Many can and will do this without ever studying the materials. As in the cases above, they will learn very little in the process, and our test results will tell us almost nothing of their readiness to perform.

Testing is a critical part of the training process. Sadly, it is easy to get it wrong. However, it is also easy to get it right - so long as there is a good understanding of what testing actually is. Knowing that testing is necessarily the process of sam- pling knowledge and skills makes it easy to make intelligent choices when designing and delivering your testing program.

There is more to be said on assessment and we will do so in future Training Tips for Ships. Until then, keep well and sail safely.

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