The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2023 - 36
CERTIFICATION FORUM By David Stephenson
Improving Exam Accessibility
As the April 1st beginning of the certification exam year draws near, it's a
good time to look at the progress we've made in improving accessibility
to the exam. To recall: as recently as 2015, all exams were administered
in physical sittings and were handwritten. Fast forward to 2022, when
the exam was made available online and on-demand for the first time.
Two years earlier, at the peak of the COVID crisis, demand for the exam
had plummeted from over 400 candidates a year to only a handful. Well,
it wasn't so much demand that was down, it was our ability to stage
physical sittings amid pandemic restrictions.
A
t least the lockdown
and other unpleasantries
from
2020 had a silver lining.
It gave us the final nudge
toward offering the exam
online. Through diligent
efforts by the late Michèle
Hansen as Certification
Committee chair and Caron
Bailey as Certification
Program manager at ATA
Headquarters, in 2021 we
were able to offer online
exams at preset times,
in cooperation with our
partners at ExamRoom.
AI. Over 150 candidates
registered for the online
exam, while fewer than 90
opted for the traditional
format of bringing their
own laptop to a physical
proctored sitting.
36 The ATA Chronicle | January/February 2023
In 2022, we took the next
step of making the exam
available on demand, rather
than during specified time
slots with a limited number
of candidates. Candidates can
now register for the exam
and in some cases take it the
same day. This forced us to
rethink a few things. Most of
all, with an on-demand
format, it wasn't feasible
for us to have ATA
proctors available 24/7 to
supplement ExamRoom's
own proctors. But relying
solely on their proctors, who
are not translators, raised
issues about our " deny
list " approach, whereby
candidates could access all
of the internet apart from
specifically prohibited sites,
such as DeepL. That's why
in 2022 we rolled out the
" allow list " : a set of carefully
selected web resources that
are available to all candidates
during the exam-to the
exclusion of everything else.
At last, the final puzzle piece
was in place, allowing us to
offer the exam on demand.
So, how did that work out,
and how do things look for
2023? We saw several trends
last year:
y Demand was up, slightly
surpassing even the
" normal " 2019 figure,
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The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2023
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