Retaking Employment Tests: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know

Abstract

The extent to which test scores change upon retesting has important implications for both organizations and individuals who apply to those organizations. We review research on retesting and score changes that dates back nearly 100 years. Our findings suggest that compared to initial test scores, retest scores tend to be higher, more varied, and more reliable and tend to demonstrate somewhat stronger relations with criteria such as academic and job performance. There also is some evidence that retesting can change the constructs test scores reflect. However, empirical research has yet to clearly delineate factors that underlie such differences between initial and retest scores. We discuss implications of these findings for organizations and applicants. We also identify key unanswered questions about retesting that future research should address.

Faking on a situational judgment test in a medical school selection setting: Effect of different scoring methods?

“…The investigation of retest effects on noncognitive instruments has primarily interpreted these effects as a result of applicant faking (Van Iddekinge & Arnold, ). However, retest effects may have many different causes, such as practice effects, genuine improvement in the construct, reduction in test anxiety, or test familiarization (Lievens et al, ; Van Iddekinge & Arnold, ). Even though the retest effect found in the current study is likely produced by faking as T 1 and T 2 were deliberately chosen to have substantial contextual differences, it is not feasible to exclude other potential sources of a retest effect.…”

“…A disadvantage of within‐subjects designs in real‐life settings is the difficulty to control for order effects, because counterbalancing is often not feasible, and for other retest effects (e.g., caused by practice effects or less test anxiety). However, retest effects on noncognitive instruments are generally viewed as a result of faking (Landers, Sackett, & Tuzinski, ; Van Iddekinge & Arnold, ). Overall, selection settings drive individuals to convey desirable impressions of themselves, but individuals may differ in their tendency to fake.…”

The Impact of Situational Test Anxiety on Retest Effects in Cognitive Ability Testing: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

“…Lievens et al [22] introduced a theoretical framework differentiating between three groups of causes leading to retest effects. More recent theoretical reviews have built upon this framework from different perspectives [23,24]; yet, they acknowledged the following three categories to be the most important: (1) Retest effects can reflect a gain in the measured latent ability. In contrast to the other two explanations, this hypothesis does not assume other states or traits apart from the cognitive ability itself to be involved in the observed increase of test scores.…”

“…Randall and Villado and van Iddekinge and Arnold [23,24] expanded Lievens et al's [22] framework by explicitly reviewing specific variables that possibly explain retest effects. The authors concluded that some factors seem to moderate the size of the retest effects (e.g., demographics, test-wiseness, and equivalence of test forms), whereas more research is needed for most of the construct-irrelevant factors.…”

Retest effects in medical selection interviews

“…Interviews are widely used for selection into undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate medical training programmes . It is therefore important that retest effects are better understood as they have the potential to change the validity of the test and alter the rank ordering of applicants, which, apart from the obvious issues of fairness, may mean that less able applicants are selected. Indeed, it may be that interviews are quite susceptible to retesting effects given the evidence that retest gains are larger with more novel tests, sample‐based tests and tests that are not strongly correlated with cognitive ability.…”