PASL flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Scaled score

A converted score that places raw scores from different exam forms onto a common metric so that forms of unequal difficulty can be compared fairly.

Cut score

The minimum score required to pass, established in advance through criterion-referenced standard-setting procedures rather than by failing a fixed percentage of candidates.

Criterion-referenced exam

An assessment that compares a candidate's performance to a defined standard of competence, not to the performance of other candidates taking the same test.

Item difficulty p-value

The proportion of examinees who answer an item correctly; values near 1.0 indicate easy items and values near 0.0 indicate hard ones.

Item discrimination index

A statistic showing how strongly answering an item correctly corresponds to high total test scores; negative values usually identify flawed or miskeyed items.

Standard error of measurement

An estimate of the variability in scores that would occur if a candidate were tested repeatedly, used to build a confidence band around an observed score.

Pretest items

Unscored items embedded in an operational exam to gather difficulty and discrimination data before they are used as scored questions.

Blueprint domain weighting

The percentage of scored items allocated to each content domain, derived during job analysis and summing to 100 percent across the exam.

Single-best-answer format

An item type in which exactly one option is defensibly correct while the remaining options are plausible but clearly wrong distractors.

Distractor

An incorrect response option designed to attract candidates who hold a common misconception, making the item discriminating rather than obviously easy.

Negatively worded stem

A question asking which option is NOT correct; the safe approach is to restate the stem positively before judging each option.

Absolute qualifiers

Words such as always, never, and only that usually make an option too extreme to be correct in professional-judgment items.

Priority question

An item asking which action comes first; the answer is the earliest step in the accepted sequence, not the most complete intervention.

Unit check

A verification step before calculation items in which units are converted to a single system, catching errors where answers differ by orders of magnitude.

Item flagging

Marking a difficult question for later review so that time is not consumed disproportionately by any single item during a timed exam.

Most appropriate response

A stem asking for the best option given stated constraints; the answer fits the described situation rather than an ideal with unlimited resources.

Informed consent elements

Capacity, disclosure of risks and alternatives, voluntariness, and documentation; all four must be present for consent to be valid.

Mandatory reporting

A statutory duty to notify an authority about specified events, such as abuse or certain diagnoses, which overrides ordinary confidentiality obligations.

Scope of practice

The set of tasks a professional is legally authorized and competent to perform; work outside it must be referred or delegated appropriately.

Conflict of interest

A situation where a personal or financial interest could bias professional judgment; the standard response is disclosure and, where required, recusal.

Contemporaneous documentation

Recording an event at or near the time it occurs, in objective factual language, which improves accuracy and legal defensibility of the record.

Addendum correction

The accepted way to fix an error in a record: append a dated, signed note rather than altering or deleting the original entry.

Dual relationship

Holding a second role, such as friend or business partner, with someone who is also a client, which risks impaired judgment and requires safeguards.

Duty to warn

A legal or ethical obligation to protect an identifiable third party from a client's credible threat, sometimes permitting a limited confidentiality breach.

Sensitivity

The proportion of people who truly have a condition and are correctly identified by a test; calculated as true positives divided by true positives plus false negatives.

Specificity

The proportion of people without a condition who are correctly identified as negative; true negatives divided by true negatives plus false positives.

Positive predictive value

The probability that a person with a positive test result actually has the condition; it rises as prevalence rises, unlike sensitivity.

Median

The middle value of an ordered data set; unlike the mean, it is resistant to distortion by extreme outliers.

Standard deviation

A measure of the average spread of values around the mean; about 68 percent of normally distributed data fall within one standard deviation.

Confidence interval

A range of plausible values for a population parameter; if a 95 percent interval for a difference excludes zero, the result is significant at 0.05.

Odds ratio

A measure of association used in case-control studies, comparing the odds of exposure among cases with the odds of exposure among controls.

Correlation versus causation

Two variables may move together without one causing the other, because of confounding, reverse causation, or coincidence; association alone does not establish cause.