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Personnel Testing Council 2005 Fall Conference

On October 25, 2005 by Jamie Madigan

As I mentioned last week I attended the annual Fall Conference for the Personnel Testing Council of Southern California. It's essentially a conference where testing professionals from Southern California get together to network, listen to presentations, and drink coffee. Kind of like SIOP, but smaller, more focussed on testing, and without the spectacle of watching graduate students try to pick each other up at the hotel lobby bar.

I was really impressed with the quality of the presentations, or at least the ones I was able to see. Power Point slides from all of them are available here in one big chunk on the PTC-SC website if you're interested, and I'll just hit them one-by-one. You can click on the headers to download that individual presentation.

Test Development and Use: New Twists on Old Questions

by Wayne Cascio

This was a general update piece on three areas that have undergone some changes in recent years:

  • Validity generalization
  • Statistical significance testing
  • Criterion measures
  • Cutoff scores
  • Cross-validation

Cascio is a very polished and engaging speaker and this was a good way to kick off the event. I was particularly interested in the validity generalization part of the presentation, as this is a topic I deal with a lot. Apparently this presentation was based on a Fall 2005 article in Human Resource Management if you're interested in more detail.

Using Secondary Sources of Data

by Calvin Hoffman

This was more of a case study (actually several case studies) around the common theme of recycling, repurposing, and reusing data from different organizational sources. Hoffman made the good point that many of us are surrounded by data that could be put to perfectly good use in various research programs if we'd only have a minimum of awareness and creativity. There are certainly downsides and limitations, but I get the feeling that Hoffman has gotten quit a bit of good out of data that other people would have ignored.

Test Validation Litigation

by Lisa Borden

This was a very thorough presentation on litigation issues related to test validation, during which Borden walked us through the laborious but pretty much bullet-proof process that she once used for (I think) the Alabama Department of Transportation to develop job minimum qualifications (MQs). The amount of work she described was quite impressive and should make for a good reference point for anyone looking to do a similar project.

California Performance Review

by Karen Coffee

Unfortunately I didn't get to see this one, but by the description and the power point slide it appears to be about the California government's immediate future plan for staffing, HR development, and the like. Always good to see these kinds of things laid out with concrete examples from agencies we're familiar with.

Setting Pass Points

by Shelly Langan

This was probably my favorite presentation of the conference. Langan was a really high-energy speaker that made what could be a boring topic engaging. In this presentation she talked about the process of setting cut scores for tests, focussing heavily on a modified Angoff method. For certain kinds of jobs and tests I think this could be an easy to follow blueprint for setting cut scores. The presentation is easily worth having in your file drawer somewhere if you think you'll ever be called upon to do this kind of thing.

Competency Modeling & Situational Judgment Interview

This presentation by Marina Mihalevsky, Kristin Olson, and Scott Letourneau started with a wide but fairly thorough view of competency modeling, then went in to a demonstration of the kinds of comptency-based tools that information technology can provide. This was kind of interesting in that it felt like someone had squashed together a master's thesis literature review and a vendor technology demonstration, and the resulting mixture was not alltogether unpleasant.

"Things I Didn't Learn in Grad School (But Wish I Had)"

by Malcolm Ree

This presentation immediately got two thumbs and a toe up from me simply by virtue of including references to and images from The Simpsons. In it Ree focused on three important issues that he never learned about in graduate school:

  • The importance of including both sexes in a validation study
  • Weighting variables/tests in a selection system
  • Measurement error

Which makes me kind of happy, since my own graduate school program did indeed hit on the last two directly and the first indirectly. I just wish my professors had spent more time on how to create a weblog related to selection and assessment, because that would have been really handy.


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all this copyright until the sun explodes, jamie madigan