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Chapter Highlights
Equivalence of assessments is needed where assessments occur in different places or at different times.
The focus should be on achieving equivalence of decisions rather than equivalence of assessment episodes.
Standardizing assessments may or may not lead to equivalence. Moreover, it is only one way to ensure equivalence.
Assessment organizers should devise ways to look for sources of bias that may undermine robust decisions. Differences between groups, however, do not always indicate presence of bias.
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Scenario
A medical education program has learners studying the same program in many different locations. All have just completed a series of assessments that will determine eligibility to progress to the next year of the program. The learners in one center seem to have performed less well than the learners in the other centers, and they claim that the assessments therefore were unfair.
If you were the academic lead or coordinator for assessments, what would you do?
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ORIENTATION TO THE CHAPTER
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Ensuring equivalence of assessments is a requirement of any system in which assessments occur in different places or at different times and where those assessments are used to inform high-stakes decisions. Examples include medical school assessments across different clinical sites, medical school assessments occurring at different times, postgraduate assessments across different clinical sites, selection assessments occurring in several countries, learners wishing to transfer between programs who have undertaken all previous assessments in a different program, and national licensing assessments. When differences are found, learners may take the view that the assessments were unfair, but there are many other possible explanations as to why the learners may not have done so well. This chapter aims to help a reader understand some of these issues and to look at quality measures that could be put in place to try to avoid, or at least explain, any perceived problems with unfairness.
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INTRODUCTION—WHY MIGHT WE WANT EQUIVALENCE?
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Assessments are often used to inform whether someone has learned enough; this could be to decide whether the person gains a qualification, is permitted to proceed into a job, or is ready to proceed to the next stage of training. In these circumstances, it is implicit that such judgments are being made against a standard. Alternatively, assessments can be used to rank learners; this applies particularly in situations where there are limited opportunities to proceed to the next stage such as competitive entry situations where there are more applicants than positions. In both circumstances (assessment against a standard or assessment for limited opportunities) assessment is of the individual’s learning. Here learners would wish to be reassured that such judgments are robust and independent of when, where, or how the assessment took place.
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However, we also know that assessment drives learning and can be used to inform where learners might next best place their efforts. In these circumstances, ...