An exam or also test or test, as it is also known, is a evaluation type that can be written, oral or as a result of the increasing participation of technology in our days, through a computer and that will have as its final objective to measure the knowledge, aptitudes, opinions or abilities that a person has regarding a certain subject, situation or field.
Preeminently, it is the educational field that has imposed this modality the most, as a measure to know when a student is lazy in any of the issues that he has been taught or when he is in a position to advance towards slightly more complex stages of knowledge. However, in recent years, other areas such as psychology or human resourcesIn the labor field, they use the exam modality a lot to evaluate the possible future returns that a person who applies for a certain position in a company, for example, can display. In this context, psychological tests have been validated through multiple previous evaluations that include the application of more or less complex statistical processing. These validation strategies allow their implementation in different social and cultural contexts; therefore, beyond the necessary adaptation to each language, the same test or test Psychological can be used in subjects of different nationalities, which does not reduce its value.
But the exam is not a test of knowledge or aptitude that is due to the benefits of modernity ... on the contrary, its origins are already found in the Chinese Empire, back in the year 605, although of course, its systematic application as a method of evaluation in schools it is relatively recent. It was in the Prussian days of the 19th century that the first examinations as we know them began to be considered today, although it must be admitted that they have been modified in a conspicuous way over the decades.
The exams can be structured through several questions that will require the development of the person subject to evaluation or through a very postmodern methodology that has prevailed in recent years and is called multiple choice, in which a question is asked and a series of answers are also offered below, some quite tricky among which the student or applicant must decide. Recent experiences have shown a general decrease in the results of multiple-choice exams in university settings, which has motivated a pragmatic variant when it comes to correction. Thus, in a traditional way, it was proposed to establish a threshold or cut-off point for approval, generally equivalent to 60% of the responses. Given that in many cases the percentage of failures is high, it has been suggested to determine the median of the scores in the group of students to pass all those cases that are above that level. Although this method has been criticized, the decline in educational training has found in this strategy an escape route to increase the number of approved students, perhaps as tricky as many questions from students. multiple choices.