ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the ongoing legal issues and challenges confronting examinations used to determine eligibility of individuals seeking to be recognized through a credentialing process with an eye toward the standard setting methodologies. Assessment mechanisms are developed by and used for many different purposes and such varied purposes may also result in equally varied legal bases for validation. Of course, legal defensibility of an examination will only be affirmatively ascertained in the wake of a challenge to the validity of the instrument itself. Examination owners follow industry accepted standards as a method of providing both credibility and legal defensibility to the instrument and the administration and scoring processes. The complex industry standards, designed to provide an industry benchmark against which to substantiate the examination program, provide a basis to ensure the legal defensibility. Criteria in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing sponsored by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education (1999) are one such resource.