An Investigation Into the Impact of Test Session Disruptions for At-Home Test Administrations

In response to the closures of test centers worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic, several testing programs offered large-scale standardized assessments to examinees remotely. However, due to the varying quality of the performance of personal devices and internet connections, more at-home examinees likely suffered “disruptions” or an interruption in the connectivity to their testing session compared to typical test-center administrations. Disruptions have the potential to adversely affect examinees and lead to fairness or validity issues. The goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which disruptions impacted performance of at-home examinees using data from a large-scale admissions test. Specifically, the study involved comparing the average test scores of the disrupted examinees with those of the non-disrupted examinees after weighting the non-disrupted examinees to resemble the disrupted examinees along baseline characteristics. The results show that disruptions had a small negative impact on test scores on average. However, there was little difference in performance between the disrupted and non-disrupted examinees after removing records of the disrupted examinees who were unable to complete the test.