Summer 23 www.nvda.org 3 Editor’s Message the competition, the exam questions for these entities are routinely peppered with, for instance, unnecessary and confusing double-negative queries or long-precursor sentences in which a correct “mm” is replaced by a “cm” even though 5–6 other factoids are 100% correct. For 100 years, there has been a group of dentists that think graduation from an accredited dental school should qualify one for a license. (And if it does not, why in the world are candidates allowed to test/experiment on real, live patients?) In the 1970’s most clinical board examinations were state specific, now most are qualifiers for large regional areas. But even after a professional license is obtained, we are required to submit to the highly profitable MOC (maintenance of certification) industry under the apparent assumption that age and experience produces a dumber professional. MOC in reality helps drive highly qualified individuals out of professions prematurely, not because of a MOC failure but because many decide MOC isn’t worth the time and expense as they enter other fields.2 While taking tests is challenging, as a test administrator for multiple entities now, (UNLV SDM, CODA, NSBDE, AAAHC, etc.) it is my opinion that creating a test that validly evaluates and ranks the test takers is at least as difficult as sitting for one. However, while test takers are painfully stressed on multiple levels, test creators are not as very little, if anything, about the test affects them personally. In contract law, this is an unequal bargaining position, and dooms the purported agreement. We all developed various levels of testmanship in order to position ourselves to achieve our goals. Testmanship has nothing to do with the subject matter of the test, but rather how to significantly optimize one’s chances for a better score. It is important in everything from driver’s Psychological testing is an area that has a singular testmanship learning curve. An acquaintance who was applying for a higher-level law-enforcement position “failed” the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) when answering “feeling” questions. A successful result was obtained when he learned to balance his answers, sometimes liking, for instance, flowers, and sometimes not, but never hating innocent rhododendrons or not being able to live without a special floral arrangement. Same person the second time around, but one who recognized the necessity of proffering different feelings. In dental school at USC, our faculty channeled the highly correlative DAT chalk carving exercise3 (Figure 1) with…oh, never mind. Anyway, we were required to carve, out of wax, each tooth in the mouth. I spent 5–6 hours on my first one, a maxillary central incisor. My instructor gave me a B and I gave him the benefit of the doubt for an, in my inexperienced opinion, obvious A tooth. But just in case, I almost doubled down on hours, 8 of them dedicated to the maxillary lateral incisor. The extra hours were rewarded, with another B. Admittedly, my dental school attitude was devolving rapidly. For the cuspid caution was thrown to the wind and #6 was knocked out in two hours. Shockingly I was rewarded, along with salvaging many extra hours, with another subjective B effort. Taking the valuable lesson that the enemy of good is better, 11 months before graduation I was the first student to finish all the clinical requirements, contentedly collecting my Bs along the way. There is a trend now in some areas to not seek the most talented candidate for a position, but the most mediocre,4 intentionally rating applicants on traits other than intellect or abilities especially suited for the position. license strategies to Ph.D. dissertations. Techniques such as determining how much average time one has for each question and then making sure time is allowed at the end of the period in order to randomly guess at all unanswered questions predicably increases a score (unless there is an enhanced penalty for a wrong answer that changes this testmanship approach). » Figure 2, Not tooth carving, but the real teeth in the USC cariology project, another A effort that was misgraded with a B What serious university, or even high school, student, has not accurately determined that a multiple-choice question was ridiculous? Who hasn’t wondered if the test developer wasn’t even as qualified to pose the question as the student?
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