PCC MarchApril Final Draft

Understanding CCA Certification Exams
By JEROME PIER, Ph.D. | CCA, PCA, Board Chairman, Western Region Certified Crop Advisors
I
never really understood what
certification means until I heard it
described by a psychometrician. I have
been a Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) for
nearly two decades and felt I knew what
it means to be a certified professional. I
recently attended the North American
Certified Crop Advisors On-line Board
Meeting. I listened to a presentation by
Scott Thayn, Ph.D., CMS, a psychometrician,
or a statistician specializing in
distinguishing the differences between
individuals. Thayn is the president of
Certification Management Services, the
third-party agency hired by the Agronomy
Society to help develop and manage
the testing required for certification. The
presentation addressed a proposal to
give rankings on how well a test taker
did on the CCA exam. Board members
were hearing from potential members
who were unable to pass the exams
and wanted more feedback to help
them study for their next attempt. The
proposal, and the way the statistician
took it apart, were a revelation, and it got
me thinking that the mechanics behind
certification are not well understood.
Certification Exam Intricacies
The Home page for Certifications under
the website Agronomy.org states, “Certification
is the standard by which professionals
are judged. The purpose of a certification
program is to protect the public and
the profession. It is a voluntary enhancement
to a person’s career credentials. Being
certified adds credibility and shows that
you are serious about what you do.”
A prospective candidate digging deeper
would find they need to meet certain
criteria to be considered a CCA: academic,
experience and examination. Simply
speaking, certification indicates one has
demonstrated the knowledge and experience
to perform at a higher level than their
peers.
Hearing the proposal to give test takers
feedback on their performance was
familiar to me as a board member who
participates on the Exam Committee for
the Western Region. I have heard from
many colleagues who did not pass
one or both certification exams and
are frustrated by the lack of a score
or indication where they underperformed.
I struggled to explain to my
friends why the exams were pass/fail
and why they just had to keep trying.
I believe the frustration lies in the
expectations of an academic testing
experience clashing with the reality
of certification exams.
Data indicates most people who take
the certification exams are recent
college graduates. Having a college
degree in agriculture is a requirement for
becoming a certified crop advisor. College
graduates have spent most of their lives
with graded exams. Academic testing presents
a broad range of questions to both examine
a student’s proficiency and encourage
them to improve. A student who gets
a low grade on a test will hopefully review
the questions marked incorrect and study
the subject to raise their grade on the final
exam. This familiar approach to testing is
contrary to certification exams.
The distribution of difficulty of certification
exam questions is quite narrow compared
to an academic exam (See Figure 1).
The certification exam begins by defining
competency areas, the major subjects
that define the everyday work of the crop
advisor. Performance objectives rest under
the competency areas. Each performance
objective spawns several possible exam
questions. Each exam question must be
tied to a performance objective to accurately
test one’s comprehensive knowledge
of agronomy.
Where an academic exam contains a large
variation in question difficulty, certification
exam questions ask, “What is the
minimum knowledge a professional must
have to be proficient in this area.” This is
determined by groups of volunteer CCAs,
with guidance by the Agronomy Society’s
excellent statistician Dawn Gibas, Ph.D.,
who reviews the performance of each exam
question. Questions that nearly everyone
gets right are eliminated as well as those
that almost no one answers correctly. A
Figure 1. Distribution of ease of questions in an
academic exam compared to certification testing.
complete exam review process takes place
every four to five years.
An illustration of the difference between
academic and certification exams can be
given with a sports analogy. An academic
exam is comparable to a high school
physical education track and field program,
where everyone is expected and encouraged
to participate. A certification exam,
on the other hand, is like the selection
process for the Olympic high jumping
team. The high school physical education
program sets the bar low and gradually
raises it to help students practice their
technique and jump higher. But when the
world competition is jumping over seven
feet, the US team would set the bar at a level
near that to select the most competitive
team. During the selection process, if the
bar is set too high, then they don’t have a
team, but set the bar too low and the team
has a poor chance of winning. When the
psychometrician used this example, the
proposal to classify the specific abilities of
test takers was withdrawn.
The complexity of 21 st -century agriculture
practiced in the Western Region of the US
supports the need for the most qualified
field people providing the best recommendations
for our growers so we can continue
to deliver the highest-quality, safest agricultural
products in the world.
Comments about this article? We want
to hear from you. Feel free to email us at
article@jcsmarketinginc.com
46 Progressive Crop Consultant March / April 2021