The Unscored Questions are Not Hurting You

As you likely know, NCARB, on each ARE exam includes some questions that are unscored and don't count toward your result. The very existence of these dummy test items gives some people hives. Don't be one of those people. 

1. Every important professional licensure test in the world I know of includes unscored test items to test the test items. Specifically, the psychometricians (scientists who measure measurement) are looking for two things: (a) does the test item sufficiently differentiate the men from the boys? (Do those who do well on the rest of the test tend to also do well on this particular question and do those who do poorly on the rest of the test tend to also do poorly on this particular question?) And (b) is the test item of an appropriate difficulty, which for most test items should see between 35% and 85% answer the question correctly. (A test item where almost everyone answered correctly, or one where everyone answered incorrectly, would be of little use.)

2. You've benefited from the past use of dummy questions. Many of the useless or error-prone dummy test items that others before you saw were weeded out before you sat for your exam, so you didn't have to see those crappy test items as graded questions.

3. Most importantly, in an alternative world without dummy questions, one with a policy of counting every question, may help your or hurt you on one particular exam division, but it is no more likely to hurt you than to help you, and, on average, dummy questions will neither help nor hurt your odds of passing. If you know the material well enough answer 80% of the test items correctly, then you're likely to answer about 80% of the questions that count correctly, meaning you'll score a 80% on the test, which leads to a pass, regardless of how you answered the dummy test items. Likewise, if you know the material well enough answer 40% of the test items correctly, then you're likely to answer about 40% of the questions that count correctly, meaning you'll score a 40% on the test, which leads to a fail, regardless of how you answered the dummy test items.

  We do things all the time where we may or may not get credit: working hard in school not knowing if this particular hour of studying will push you over the edge in your scholarship application; taking a relative with Alzeimer's for a walk they may not remember; staying late at work even though your boss might not know you are doing so; patiently helping a difficult customer who may not tip or write a review; picking up the trash in the park when we don't know if anyone is looking; giving blood; donating to a charity anonymously; letting a stranger merge in traffic; getting up early to run knowing it probably will, but may not, help us with our health. Yet you know, with a high degree of certainty, the people who are the type to work late to meet a deadline, donate anonymously, or allow a stranger to merge because you've observed a representative sample of that person's behavior when they had no reason to think that someone was watching.