Testing through the Internet

Introduction

Many have hailed the Internet as opening up a whole new set of opportunities for advancing the science of psychometrics and the technology of testing. Others have expressed concerns that the growth in the use of the Internet for testing will lead to poor tests being developed, good tests being used badly and a growth of bad practice that will adversely affect not only individual test takers but also act to discredit testing in general. This entry will explore both the areas of concern associated with the Internet and the opportunities it affords. More extensive treatment of these issues can be found in Bartram (1997, 2000).

Understanding the Internet

In order to appreciate its potential and its dangers, it is important to understand what the Internet is and how it works. The Internet is, literally, an interconnected set of computer networks (hence, inter-net). These various networks are able to communicate with each other through the use of a common shared protocol (TCP/IP).

The Internet has been with us since the 1950s. In its early days, the Internet, as a means of communication, was difficult to use. Use of the Net was confined largely to academics and the military, and its main use was for email and file transfer. The advance that led to the Internet becoming part of our everyday life was the development of the world wide web in 1992. A ‘web’ is a collection of pages connected by ‘hyperlinks’. By simply ‘clicking’ with a mouse on a hyperlink on one page, the user can move from that page to another. Web pages are accessed using a ‘browser’. This is a piece of software that resides on the users' computers, which lets them interact with the Internet and display web pages. With the addition of search facilities, the main features of the current World Wide Web were defined.

Webs (that is, interlinked collections of pages) are held on a ‘server’. This will deliver pages to users when they call up the web's domain name (or URL). A web can reside on one server or consist of sub-webs divided across a number of physical servers. The Internet, as the transport medium, takes care of the process of finding pages and delivering them to the user.

In its simplest form, the pages delivered over the Internet to a web user will consist of content defined by HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). HTML contains simple formatting and layout instructions that tell the user's computer how to display the contents of the page. HTML pages can include graphics, sound, and video as well as text. However, the more information HTML pages contain, the longer it takes to deliver them.

In addition to HTML pages, it is possible to download applications (known as applets) that can run on the user's computer independently of the Internet. Tests written in this way will continue to run even if the Internet connection to the user is broken. This approach provides the test designer with far more control. However, for security reasons, some users may operate in environments that forbid the downloading and running of applets.

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