Examinee effort can impact the validity of scores on higher education assessments. Many studies of examinee effort have briefly noted gender differences, but gender differences in test-taking effort have not been a primary focus of research. This review of the literature brings together gender-related findings regarding three measures of examinee…

In the context of an upper-level psychology course, even when students were given an opportunity to refer to text containing the answers and change their exam responses in order to improve their exam scores, their performance on these questions improved slightly or not at all. Four experiments evaluated competing explanations for the students'…

States that, due to confusion of concepts and lack of systemization, "previous studies are often difficult to interpret and consequently...afford little possibility of formulating more precise statements about those errors the concepts represent...." A proposal for systematization is presented. (Author/RW)

This article presents a simple scale to detect faking good and faking bad responses on the 1967 16 Personality Factor, Form A. (Author/DEP)

The "Complementary Sheet" is applicable to Wechsler Scales: WBI, WBII, WISC, and WAIS. It consists of two sides of one sheet and has space for data collection of Picture Arrangement, Block Design, Object Assembly, and Digit Symbol or Coding. It lends itself well to an analysis of the means, not just the end result, of an examinee's…

Reports on an evaluation of answer changing on multiple choice tests. States that any change a student is inclined to make, no matter how low the confidence, was found to lead to a significant gain. Concludes that students who change answers are likely to benefit despite the widely held belief that "first impressions are best." (GEA)

Contrary to popular belief, and in accordance with research over a long period of time, changed answers to objective test items tend to be correct. (MJB)

Thirty-six undergraduate psychology students who had high measured test anxiety were randomly assigned to one of three groups: covert reinforcement, placebo control, and no-treatment control. Pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up scores were obtained on three criterion measures. The findings supported the use of covert reinforcement for…

The susceptibility to faking on the Tennessee Self Concept Scale was examined among college students. Additionally, groups of respondents, instructed to respond in a "random" fashion to pre-determined numbers of items in the TSCS, were subjected to a plausibility analysis of their test response vectors using the Rasch measurement model.…

The effects of answer changes on test scores of relatively non-test-sophisticated examinees was studied. Findings showed that a significantly greater number of changes were from wrong to right, thus increasing total test scores. Answer-changing behavior may reflect more than learned test-taking skill. (Author)

The assumption that examinees either know the answer to a test item or else guess at random is usually totally implausible. A different assumption is outlined, under which formula scoring is found to be clearly superior to number right scoring. (Author)

The purpose of this paper is to acquaint the reader with the topic of test-wiseness. The first section of this paper presents a series of multiple-choice items. The reader is asked to respond to them and is encouraged to read carefully the remainder of this paper for techniques which could improve test-taking performance. The next section defines…

The test-taker is viewed as a hypothesis-generating organism who can become "testwise." Testwiseness is defined as a stable skill, acquired by test-taking experiences, by which an individual can make test responses conform to a desired response pattern. (Author/MV)