Our previous blog post went into detail about the Item Writing meeting for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM
®) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO
®) tests. We suggest you read that post (and the others!) before continuing as it will create an informative background for this post.
The Item Writing team wrote over 480 questions (wow!) for the CSM and CSPO tests, but we wanted the opportunity to inspect and adapt those questions. This is primarily why we needed to have the Item Review meeting. We put out the call for volunteers on our Get Involved page and received over 120 applications! We reviewed each one to ensure that we had a diverse group of individuals.
We would’ve loved having all 120 folks at our Scrum Alliance office, but ultimately, a new group of 10 individuals from the Scrum Alliance community were chosen to meet in Denver for two days to review all 480 questions (or items) that the Item Writing team wrote. The Review team also reviewed questions that were submitted via the larger Scrum Alliance community! If you remember, we put out the call for any individual with a valid Scrum Alliance certification to submit questions that they would like to see on the CSM or CSPO test. This meeting was expertly guided by two representatives from Prometric, a test development company with whom we worked.
We decided to have two groups of five so that each group could review questions – divide and conquer! The subject matter experts (SMEs) reviewed each question to determine technical accuracy, comprehensive language structure, any potential bias, and also ensure that it matched the correct domain. If an item didn’t meet its mark, then the Item Review team would edit or delete the item.
The team successfully reviewed all the questions for both the CSM and CSPO tests. We attribute their success to their extremely hard work and the fact that they used Scrum! Throughout the two days, the Item Review team had working agreements, a parking lot, and utilized thumb voting and timeboxes to make sure we stayed on track. We also completed a retrospective so we knew how to improve our 2
nd day and future meetings!
None of this could have been done without our wonderfully engaged community! Many thanks to the following SMEs who joined us for the Item Review meeting: Charlene Hudak, Chris McCauley, Corina Mendenhall, David Bacon, Mizanur Rahman, Punita Dave, Raven Cashaw, Sumathi Arcot, Teddy Carroll, and Unmesh Tambwekar.
