BEagle, I don't see how that would work. I'm sure people will recognise the questions rather than their number. We need to accept that, with the internet and social media, it's not possible to keep exam papers or a question bank secure.
I think the only approach that
will work is to produce a
huge question bank, with the set of questions and sequence for any candidate chosen at random from this very large set. The exam could then be sat using paper (my preference) or as an e-exam. There are several ways to implement this, here are some:
- Most controlled: the CAA provide a website where examiners request a set of random numbers which index into the question bank for a particular candidate and exam
- Less controlled: the CAA publish tables of random numbers, from which an examiner randomly picks a set for each candidate
- Least controlled: examiners use a random number generator (such as https://www.random.org/integers/?num...t=html&rnd=new) to produce an index into the question bank
Because the question bank would be very large it would be a herculean task for a candidate to try to learn the answers. Generating the question bank would not be so critical as now and could start with the banks that already exist, such as
http://avsport.org/docs/Test_Bank_pvt.pdf.
It's good that the exams are being improved, but I think it's unfortunate that their development has taken so long and has not been carried out in a more open way. I hope the process won't just produce a few new exams because they will probably be on the internet a couple of weeks after being published so much of the effort will have been wasted. The world has changed.
HFD