Prometric visit/Entry11

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Wesley Landry

Prometric visit

We got the privilege to visit a place where all our nightmares, as college students, are devised. The place where tests are formulated Prometric. All things considered this was a pretty interesting visit. We were able to see all the stuff that goes into making a test its actually a lot more complicated then everyone thinks. They have over 2000 employees working on a 24-7 bases all with a vast knowledge of psychometrics.

            Psychometrics is the study of how the brain works to figure out problems. I/t is an ingenious way of designing tests and making it at the correct difficulty level to test and make sure that the people who are responsible for other people’s lives have the vast amount of knowledge to insure that they are in good hands.

            While at Prometric we were introduced to a little bit of history of the company. One of the things that I found really interesting is the story that was told about Ireland. Apparently Ireland used to have a lot of car accidents until Prometric redesigned a test for Ireland to give to the people who go through the driving program. A new statistic was found and it showed that after Prometric modified test the death rate was reduced by a whopping 50%. The company was started through Navel and was purchased by ETS in the year 2006 from Thompson corp. Prometrics first test was a test to become a stalk broker.  

            After hearing some history about Prometric they then went on to explain to us what makes a good test. First of all the test must be fair pertaining to the knowledge that the test take has acquired through their program, next they must have accurate knowledge to answer the questions of the test, the test should have an appropriate level of difficulty for the person taking the test and the test should be secure so to eliminate any form of cheating. All these aspects are taken into consideration when the people at Prometric are engineering their tests, and so far it has worked very well.

A big thing they strive for at Prometric is standardization; they want to make sure that every individual has the same kind of opportunity that the last person had in that same field so the tests are not the same but the areas where they ask the questions are very similar. Japan is a very good place to go into test making because it goes back to the roots of what Japanese people did to see if someone was ready for the next step.

After we were done listening to a short presentation of Prometric we were then able to tour the facility and see the different areas where people come to take these tests, it was really interesting to see how much went into making a test. All in all it was a very informative and interesting trip in which I learned more about a topic that I hade no idea about.