Project Overview
The National Dental Hygiene Certification Board (NDHCB) acts in the public interest to ensure high-quality standards for Dental Hygienists in Canada by providing a valid and reliable testing mechanism for dental hygiene competencies to support Canadian regulatory bodies. On behalf of all Canadian provincial and territorial Dental Hygiene regulators (except QC), the NDHCB is the agency responsible for the development, administration, scoring, and reporting of results of the National Dental Hygiene Certification Exam (NDHCE). The NDHCE is currently administered 3 times per year to more than 1,200 test-takers from across Canada.
Our long-standing partnership with the NDHCB originated from the necessity to transition from a paper-based version of the NDHCE to a computer version of the exam. The NDHCB was looking for a vendor that could support this transition and securely manage and deliver their exams across Canada during specific exam administration windows. They were also seeking to combine a modern item development mechanism with a robust examination delivery tool.
What We Did
We migrated all paper-based examination questions and configuration requirements to the Meazure Exam Platform. The NDHCB online exam administration was successfully initiated in January 2011. In 2013, we became the NDHCB’s sole psychometric vendor and began providing various psychometric consulting services including competency and blueprint development/validation, multiple-choice item writing training, automated exam form assembly, standard setting, statistical analysis (using both Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory), scoring, and reporting. YAS and the NDHCB also work together to develop and administer practice examinations (i.e., prep tests for prospective test-takers) and quality assurance tests (for registered dental hygienists).
Over the past 8 years, the NDHCB and YAS have formed a strong partnership in which examinations are delivered securely and efficiently, and to the highest technical requirements. The robust collaboration between our two organizations has resulted in a rigorous and fair examination process that upholds the highest testing standards.