Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us

by Daniel Koretz

Coaching need not inflate scores. If the format or content of a test is sufficiently unfamiliar, a modest amount of coaching may even increase the validity of scores. For example, the first time young students are given a test that requires filling in bubbles on an optical scanning sheet, it is worth spending a very short time familiarizing them with this procedure before they start the test. Most often, however, coaching either wastes time or inflates scores. Inflation occurs when coaching generates gains that are limited to a specific test—or to others that are very similar—and that do not generalize well to other tests of the same domain or to performance in real life. A good example is training students to use a process of elimination in answering multiple-choice questions—that is, eliminating incorrect answers rather than figuring out the correct one.

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