2020 RETA Breeze Sept-Oct

RETA TESTING CORNER NO. 21

RETA’s Testing and ANSI Guru

Dr. Ron Rodgers, RETA’s Psychometrician (testing expert) and ANSI Accreditation Manager, has guided development of all RETA credentialing exams since 2002. RETA Testing Corner provides information and answers questions from RETA members, candidates and others to help them earn and benefit from RETA credentials.

references that will be available onscreen during the test. Candidates for all RETA exams are encouraged to become as familiar with the study guide for their exam as they arewith operatingmanuals for the refrigeration facilities they support in their work. Each study guide can be downloaded free from Certification screens on the RETA website. RETA practice tests allow candidates to take the same types of questions that appear on each test. These questions use the same references and test the same topics that appear in parallel RETA certification exams. All practice test questions were approved for use in RETA certification exams before being “retired” for use in practice tests; no practice test question can appear in a RETA certification exam. Practice tests can be purchased on the RETA website for $59 per attempt.

exams. This shows that some candidates are preparing effectively for the new exams. Another group of CIRO candidates that had a pass rate of 89% from January through June fell to 25% with the new CIRO examinations. RETA offers several resources to help candidates prepare to perform well on its exams. This is especially true when test specifications and references change. • The CIRO Study Guide documents the new CIRO content outline and includes new references from IR-2, BE-1 and BE-2. • The CIRO Practice Test increased from 50 to 70 questions to give candidates a larger sample of the types of questions that appear on the new tests.

RETA updated three CIRO test references in 2019. This led to major changes in CIRO test specifications that appear in CIRO examinations, the CIRO Study Guide and CIRO Practice Test. As testing has resumed following the Covid-19 pandemic, test results are showing that not all candidates are preparing effectively for the new test. CARO also was modified to reflect minor adjustments in test specifications based on work by RETA’s Certification Committee in 2019 and 2020. Candidates in all test centers performed almost identically during the first six months of 2020 for CARO exams. Average scores on the new CARO exams dropped slightly in some content areas and improved in others. CARO total scores from July through September were half a point below what they were from January through June. Scores dropped significantly for the new CIRO exams. The table shows results for each CIRO content area. More than 60% of the questions on the January-June CIRO exams are still in the new CIRO exams. Average scores by content area fell by more than 10 points in five of the eight topics. The pass rate fell from 78% to 65%. See chart. The most likely cause of this decline in scores is that some CIRO candidates are not preparing effectively using the new Industrial Refrigeration Book 2 (IR-2) and new editions of Basic Electricity 1 and 2 (BE-1 and BE-2). All three include new content. One group of CIRO candidates had a 77% pass rate for July through September, which is virtually unchanged from the earlier CIRO

We welcome your questions about RETA’s credentialing exams and activities. Send your questions by email to certification@ reta.com.

The Certification Committee revalidated all existing CIRO questions and wrote over 400 new questions to support these examinations. Each RETA study guide provides the content outline for the test, identifies books that a candidate should study, and includes

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