COMPTIA SCORING 1

[just1fix]

Got a ? on the CompTia exams. I am getting ready to take the A+ Core/OS. and the A+ Network next week. I understand that the scoring goes from 100 to 900 points. To pass you need to score around 500-525, depending on the exam. The passing score is in the middle range of the 100-900 points, that you can get. That being said, that means the scoring % is about half, since 500-525 is between 100-900 points. I find it hard to believe that you could score a 50-55% and be passing the test.
Another ? that I have that many others probably have, is when you are given a question and of the possible choices, you are given the notorious "Chose all the apply". From what I read in other forums, when the question tells you to "select two" or "select three", you must get all of them to receive credit. No partials for that. However on the "Chose all that apply", you are given partial credit if you do not select all the answers. Please fill me in. Thanks

 

[glister]

Certification exam scores are not arbitrarily arrived at. After the exam is constructed with the aid of Subject Matter Experts (SME), the exam is placed into beta and a valid number of exams will allow Psychomatricians to generate statistics about the level of difficulty of a question against the final scores. It is a rather involved process. These guys do all this number crunching so that an exam item (question to you & me) is legally defensible. That means if a disgruntaled test taker takes CompTIA to court over their test grade, CompTIA has the data to support their position.

On questions with multiple answers, you are told how many answers apply. As far as partial credit, who knows. CompTIA is not just real open on their grading system and I think they keep it that way on purpose. and of course this doen't take into account any "unscored" questions that they might throw in. This allows CompTIA to do continual revision on existing exams without having to go thru the arduous task of beta exams and recalulating cut scores. They are doing it on a continuing basis. That's why they got rid of adaptive exams. They were too expensive to maintain & revise.

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[JohnO2005]

Here's the real story, straight from someone who DOES know:

The scoring system is setup in such a way that the score can not be "traced" or logically deduced. A scaled scoring system provides additional security to the exam, in order to provide better control for candidates that might try to determine how many items they missed, and which items those might be (to then be posted on internet sites, etc).

100 would be 0%, and 900 would be all correct, but all the scores in between are reached through a two step mathematical formula performed in the background. Basically the amount of questions correct, generates a percentage score which we are all used to, but that is then converted to the scaled score through another mathematical formula.