Services

Counseling and Advocating for Testing and Assessment Organizations

In education and workplace settings, across many disciplines, secure examinations and assessments are often used to measure knowledge, skills and aptitude. Examinations and assessments serve numerous purposes that include screening, certification, licensure, and educational evaluation. Whether involved in assessment, certification, licensure, or educational admissions, testing organizations face numerous challenges that can impact the validity of examination results and thereby potentially undermine the decisions made based upon exam results. These challenges include, but are not limited to, unscrupulous test preparation companies, negligent test delivery vendors, copyright infringers, and cheaters. Marc is well experienced in counseling testing organizations on legal strategies to minimize the risks presented by these challenges and many other challenges unique to their business.

Marc counsels testing organizations on the protection of their intellectual property, assists them in crafting and implementing legal protections to secure all of their rights, minimize cheating, ensure the validity of test results and enforce all intellectual property rights and program policies that apply to their examinations. When threats and breaches occur, Marc can effectively guide testing organizations through the response process from a legal perspective and prepare them to pursue all potentially available remedies, including score cancellations, organization-imposed sanctions, licensure proceedings, civil litigation, and, if appropriate, referral of the matter for criminal prosecution.

In addition, Marc is well-versed in the Americans with Disabilities Act and tracks the ever-changing legal landscape to ensure that testing clients make decisions on accommodation requests that will be upheld if tested in court.

Examples of assistance Marc provides to assessment and testing clients include:

Drafting Agreements and Policies

  • Drafting, reviewing and revising legal agreements with employees, subject matter experts, item writers, stakeholders, test delivery channels, vendors and examinees.
  • Drafting, reviewing and revising testing organization program policies and procedures.
  • Drafting, reviewing and revising testing organization privacy policies.
  • Counseling on all legal issues related to formation and launch of new certification programs.

IP and Privacy Counseling

  • Preparation and filing of secure copyright registrations and trademarks.
  • Review and improvement of testing organization practices to ensure complete legal protection of all intellectual property, including analysis of sufficiency of confidentiality practices to ensure trade secret protection of exam content.
  • Review and improvement of testing organization privacy and data protection policies.

Legal Response Strategies

  • Counseling and legal guidance on score cancellations and/or invalidations.
  • Investigation of copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets by examinees and others..
  • Conducting legally privileged investigations to identify and hold accountable individuals who have cheated on secure tests and others who have aided and abetted cheating.
  • Pursuing civil litigation against perpetrators of exam fraud and item harvesters.
  • Preparing and making criminal prosecution referrals of test security breaches involving criminal conduct.
  • Counseling and advising on sanctions proceedings against stakeholders and examinees.
  • Drafting and lobbying for proposed state and federal laws and regulations that enhance protections for testing organizations.