Harold,
As you and Debra continue your review of
the Emcomm Courses, I hope you are still surveying the performance of our
mentors and are prepared to disqualify any who do not perform at ARRL
standards, as noted in my prior emails from Mr. Toohmand verified by Dennis Dura
regarding Mr. Reid.
73, Mary K1MMH
From:
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007
3:00 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: [
Hi,
FYI,
Debra Johnson recently
sent this out to the folks who give our EmComm course exams in the Field.
These procedures needed to be tightened up because we all believed that there
is some amount of abuse and outright cheating on these exams.
73,
Harold
From:
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007
9:24 AM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Changes for Field
Emergency Communications exams
Greetings!
We’ve been reviewing the forms and procedures involved
with the administration of Emergency Communications courses and exams given in
the field and have identified some areas where changes and updates are needed.
So here are some of the results of our housecleaning.
New test booklets are being released for field tests of all
3 levels of the Emergency Communications courses. These new tests must be
used for any exams given after January 1, 2008. In late December, we will
be mailing exam materials including the new test booklets to all CEs who have
registered an exam session during January. If you are planning an exam session
after January, please request the new exam materials at least 2 weeks in
advance of the scheduled date so we can supply them to you.
As most of you are aware, we have not been charging the
classroom fees ($20 for members, $50 for non-members) for field instruction and
exams stated on the Activity Report form for quite a while. We have
revised that form to eliminate those fees. We’ve also eliminated
the “Activity Registration for Individuals” form. It will no longer
be necessary as all of the information captured on this form will be captured
on the revised Student Registration/Answer Sheet form.
Other changes:
The instructions for administration of field exams have been
revised and include a requirement that examiners insure that open books and
notes are not permitted during exams.
Effective January 1, the exam fee will be increased to $14,
to be consistent with VE test fees and to help offset the significant handling
costs we incur to manage the records, provide materials for field exams, and
print and mail certificates and ID cards. As with VE fees, examiners may
retain up to $6 of this fee to offset costs of delivering the exam.
We are in process of revising the ARRL Web pages that support
the Continuing Education Program. This will occur over time, so there may
be some links that are disabled in the process of rearranging the pages and
revising the content. One new page that is available for the use of field
examiners is a CE Resource Page. The link is: www.arrl.org/cep/fieldexams. On
this page you will find a listing of the form numbers of current test booklets,
links for all other forms needed to conduct an exam session, guidelines for
exam sessions and any other information related to ARECC field exams. We
will be building a similar page for field instructors, and will post
instructional resources that have been shared by other CIs there.
I hope you will welcome these changes.
73,
Debra
Debra Johnson, K1DMJ
Education Services
Manager
ARRL, the National
Association for Amateur Radio
(860) 594-0296
Fax: (860) 594-0259
WJ1B Again:
Since we sent this out,
two issues have been raised:
1. Why does the field test need to be closed book while the on-line
course in open book? Here’s Debra’s response:
The on-line version of the course requires completion of activities
and dialog with a mentor. There are unit tests that reinforce the
material that needs to be completed after each learning unit which expose the
student to all of the possible exam questions. This assures that the
student has engaged with the content of the course even though he or she may
take the final assessment with notes open.
By requiring that the student who takes a field exam to take an
exam without notes we are requiring a level of “digestion” of the
material—some thought and understanding and engagement with the course
material. We also want to prevent what we hear is sometimes happening in
the field where students are taking marked up answer sheets or manuals into an
exam session that have been passed along to them by others. They are completing
the exam with little exposure to or understanding of the course content.
2. If the test administrators already have been notified the
registrants for exams given in January that the fee is $10, we will honor that
original fee.