Applicant FAQs

The ABVLM Board Certification Examination was developed using the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which establishes procedures for exam development to insure valid interpretation of score results. Standards are published and adopted by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education.
Exam items are written, reviewed and approved by an item writer committee, consisting of subject matter experts and psychometricians. The subject matter experts are selected to ensure gender, geographic and primary specialty diversity. All items are reviewed by the entire committee, with a decision to accept, reject or revise.
Item development is ongoing in order to maintain relevancy and currency of the exam. The committee goes through a rigorous process, with the input of psychometricians, to add new items each year. The committee then selects items to be on that year's exam, with a content weighting based on the ABVLM board-approved content document.

Psychometricians analyze every item after they are presented on a test. Statistical analysis is done to assess how well the item yielded useful information about candidate ability. Items that fail to perform properly increase the error of the exam and therefore do not contribute to the precision of the pass/fail decision made about candidates. Any item that performs poorly is flagged for possible deletion. Deletion of poorly performing items is done to create a more precise and fair examination. All comments from examinees are reviewed and considered.
The reliability and standard error of measurement are carefully evaluated for each exam. Each of the ABVLM exams to date have performed very well on these measures.

The level of performance required for passing a credentialing test should depend on the knowledge and skills necessary for acceptable performance and should not be adjusted to regulate the number or proportion of persons passing the test. The ABVLM Board Certification Exam follows this model, called Criterion-Referenced testing. The pass point was determined by careful analysis and judgment of acceptable performance in consultation with the ABVLM consultant psychometricians.
Each exam is equated to a benchmark scale established every five years. A test equating process is designed to calculate differences in the difficulty of examinations among administrations and then adjust the scale of the current test administration so that the same criterion standard can be used. By accounting for differences in difficulty across years, all candidates have a comparable opportunity to pass the examination, regardless of when they take the test. For example, if the test administered in a particular year is found to be more difficult relative to other years' tests, the percent correct necessary to pass would be lowered to be equivalent to the criterion standard. On the other hand, if a test administration is easier, the percent correct necessary to pass would be higher to be equivalent to the criterion standard.