Who develops tests for the NMT: Tetiana Vakulenko explains how tasks for entrants are created
1 November 09:08
Tests for the national multi-subject test are created by hundreds of authors from different parts of the country – teachers, scientists and methodologists. Before being included in the final selection for use in real testing, each task goes through several stages of verification, testing, and review.
Tetiana Vakulenko, director of the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment, told the "Komersant Ukrainian" YouTube channel.
“There is no single person who develops all test tasks, even within the same subject. We work with many authors of tasks. The number of test items we need is huge, because we test more than 300,000 applicants every year during the NMT,” she said.
According to the director of the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assurance, up to 20 thousand applicants take part in each NMT session, and there can be up to twenty such sessions per year. A unique test set is formed for each of them in all academic subjects, so the tasks are not repeated.
“The specialists of the Ukrainian Center order tasks from the authors. These authors are teachers, researchers in the relevant subject area, and methodologists. They develop a certain number of test tasks according to our order. Two reviewers, who are not specialists of the Ukrainian Center, review these tasks – they provide their expert opinion on the compliance with the EIT program, the presence or absence of errors,” explained Vakulenko.
If an item receives two positive reviews, it is added to the test bank. “Next, the task is tested in practice among schoolchildren or students to find out whether the condition is correctly perceived, whether there are any answer options that are too “attractive” or misleading for the participants,” Vakulenko said.
“Based on these tasks, the center’s methodologists form test collections, analyze statistics, and design tests so that they are similar, regardless of the testing session during which they are used,” the director noted.
According to Tetyana Vakulenko, there are hundreds of test authors, and only a few methodologists who create the final selections for each subject.
In total, according to Vakulenko, the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment employs about 370 people, including regional offices.
