Students unhappy with solution to cancel segment of psychometric exam following leak

The institute said it would cancel the section in question so that it will not be included in the final grading of the exams.

By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI
Empty Classroom (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Empty Classroom
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Students are protesting the solution provided by the National Institute for Testing and Evaluation (NITE) canceling a segment of the psychometric exam.
The institute announced on Sunday it would cancel one of the quantitative reasoning sections of the psychometric exam after students alleged that it had been included ahead of time in a mock test of one of the test preparation institutes.
The institute said it would cancel the section in question so that it will not be included in the final grading of the exams. Despite this, students are protesting and claiming that this move is not enough, as it still provided the students who were familiar with the section a distinct “advantage,” granting them more time to move on to other sections.
The students even launched a Facebook page on Monday – “The Official page for protesting the April 2015 Psychometric Exam” – which has to date garnered almost 100 “likes.”
“Already today a formal letter with legal representation will be sent to the National Institute for Testing and Evaluation protesting their solution and demanding a more thorough examination of the circumstances and a proper solution for all the examinees,” the students wrote on the Facebook page.
The psychometric exam, required for students applying for admittance to universities and colleges, has eight sections and three parts – Quantitative, Verbal (Hebrew) and English, and determines the scores relative to the success and failure of all students who were tested on a particular date.
As such, many candidates take a course in one of numerous test preparation institutes and sit for mock exams ahead of the real test.
If a group of students had access to or knowledge of questions from the real exam, it would help them increase their scores, and reduce the scores of all others who sit for the exam.
“Those who know me know, that for the past three months I have been studying like crazy for the upcoming psychometric exam in April.
I signed up for an excellent [preparatory] course, I felt that the course was able to bring me to a point of knowledge and to the achievements in the simulation [exams] to which I aspired,” one student who took the exam wrote on her Facebook page.
According to this student, following the exam she found out that, “a full quantitative chapter that was on the real exam also appeared on one of the simulation exams in the past of students of a certain [test preparatory] institute.”
She attached pictures of the section in question to her Facebook post, which has garnered more than a thousand “likes” and “shares.”
“Ultimately, this situation is likely to lead to an unfair test and to lower grades of students who studies for three months and paid a lot of money on a course and on the test date,” she wrote.
The National Institute for Testing and Evaluation, which administers the psychometric exam, had said it would look into the incident.
“On learning about the complaints the institute began to thoroughly examine the issue and will notify its findings to all test takers upon completion,” the institute said.
The institute also noted that there are eight chapters in every exam, of which only six are used to determine the final score.
The other two sections are used as “backup and for various testing.”


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