That is silly. What would a member of a home inspector licensing board know about evaluating an exam? Especially ours which has so many cutting-edge built-in technologies (developed by InterNACHI). We don’t even know of any exam evaluation firms that could do it, let alone $25/meeting licensing board members.
InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination was developed by InterNACHI over many years, measures competence in home inspectors based on the critical job components and delineated skill sets from Standards of Practice, Code of Ethics, interviews, mock inspections, surveys, observations, group discussions, and data collected from some 430,000+ exams already taken. With the industry's most popular exams, quizzes and online education, combined with it's 255,000 page website and 450,000 post message board (both the largest in the industry), InterNACHI, the largest home inspection association in the world, collects and possesses more home inspection exam question/answer data and industry information than all other private and government entities combined. Unlike other home inspection examinations that may use a panel of experts (if at all) to review and validate each question once, InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination exploits its ongoing access to most every expert in the field. The questions/answers and any related performance issues stand the test of time under the industry scrutiny suffered in InterNACHI's message board, InterNACHI's open to all existing exams and quizzes, InterNACHI's online education, InterNACHI's exam prep tools, InterNACHI's expert trainers/educators, and InterNACHI's various professional committees. In essence, everything the industry knows, every question ever asked to test that knowledge, and every right and wrong answer ever given to those questions, are forever examined to verify technical accuracy and content validity. Other existing home inspector examinations admit that their content is based solely on one old role delineation study. Exploitation of InterNACHI's massive data collection abilities has permitted the build up of a supplemental bank of psychometrically sound items (questions) that are rotated into the InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination pool replacing obsolete items with items of similar content and difficulty. This is especially important in the inspection industry where the pool of items used in licensing exams is widely known and circulated. The massive culling of this industry-wide data also provides a vast, published item reference in support of legal defensibility. InterNACHI's exam system's built-in intelligence constantly and automatically calculates and recognizes absolutely everything from individual repeat improvement to overall industry knowledge trends.
InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination was developed using a blueprint based largely on InterNACHI's Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics with test methodology based primarily on Standards for Education and Psychological Testing by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education. InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination also relied on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection Procedures, the National Commission for Certifying Agencies' Standards for Accreditation, and other applicable standards.
The items in InterNACHI’s Online Inspector Examination are biased toward application, analysis, dynamic problem solving, and defect recognition where the exam taker demonstrates learning at a higher cognitive level by applying his/her knowledge on new material. New material includes a referenced photo or diagram or a situational/hypothetical stem question. InterNACHI’s Online Inspector Examination can be administered open book as it simulates the situations home inspectors face every day. Biasing InterNACHI’s Online Inspector Examination toward application, analysis, dynamic problem solving, and defect recognition gives the exam a high degree of validity for predicting inspector success in the field. Other existing home inspection licensing exams are based on recall. Such minimum standard exams do nothing more than test the exam takers ability to remember the correct answers and re-state facts.
Because InterNACHI is already the largest provider and administrator of home inspection exams and quizzes, inappropriate, poorly worded, ambiguous or questionable questions and/or answers are quickly recognized and revised or removed from future versions. In addition, new items are developed as the industry evolves. With exception of the lightly weighted content domain *industry terms*, InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination minimizes the effects of ancillary skills (such as terminology familiarity) by using commonly used phrases including synonyms where available. This also minimizes the effect of geographic bias so prominent in the inspection industry.
Each stem question in InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination is meaningful in and of itself. In other words, the questions are worded so that the exam taker could predict the correct answer after merely reading the question. For instance, *Q. Radon... A. exposure increases one's chance of contracting lung cancer.* would be worded as follows: *Q. Radon exposure increases one's chance of... A. contracting lung cancer.* (note, this is not an actual item found on InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination).
Negatively stated questions appear on InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination only when necessary. For instance, when technically correct, "*should not slope downward*" would be worded "*should slope upward*" on InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination. Negative stems that include terms such as "*except for*" or "*does not include*" are avoided in InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination.
Because use of "all of the above" and "none of the above" should not be used as distracters (incorrect answer options), InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination does not incorporate such answer options at all.
Because very few things in professional settings are "always" or "never" true, InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination uses such terms judiciously.
InterNACHI formally and informally validates every question and every answer choice (correct and incorrect). Each item is validated to ensure that the knowledge and/or skill tested by the item is essential for one to pass*, *validated to assure that the keyed correct answer is in fact correct without ambiguity, and validated to ensure that the incorrect answer options are in fact incorrect, but still plausible enough to provide distraction. Distracters (incorrect answer choices) found within InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination are not tricky or deceptive, but instead employ common errors.
As part of the psychometric analysis performed on the InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination, each question's pass/fail rate is calculated and recorded each time the question is answered so that the question difficulty is quantified over time. Regular checks comparing the answers given by experienced, skilled inspectors with those offered by inexperienced, unskilled inspectors verify that each question contributes to testing the exam taker's competency. Also, at the end of every exam session descriptive statistics custom to each exam taker are displayed along with a color pie chart depicting that particular exam taker's weaknesses.
Even though each item on InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination has only one correct or clearly best answer, InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination scoring system permits modest reward for next best answer choice and severe punishment for very wrong answer choice.
InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination scoring system is much more advanced than existing home inspector exams to the benefit of public safety. Each item is validated to determine the relative importance on assessing the exam takers knowledge and skill, as is each answer to each question. Then each is weighted accordingly. Not only are the questions in InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination weighted, the answers are as well in the sense that an exam taker is punished severely (in terms of score) for incorrectly answering questions that indicate that he/she could cause physical harm to the public, but not greatly rewarded (in terms of score) for correctly answering such questions. This same scoring is used for questions that test minimum competency. Likewise, difficult questions (questions that lie outside or nearly outside the scope of a home inspection) are weighted such that the exam taker is not severely punished for answering incorrectly. Other existing home inspector exam's questions and answers are all weighted the same in terms of scoring.
InterNACHI's Online Inspector Examination was developed based on the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education's Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection Procedures, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
InterNACHI’s Online Inspector Examination is the only valid exam in the inspection industry (that I know of). There might be others, but I don’t of them.