Assessment terms beginning with B

This is a measurement glossary, not a general HR glossary. It covers the vocabulary that appears the moment you open a score report or challenge a vendor's claim — reliability, validity, norms, cut scores, item statistics and fairness analysis — because that is the vocabulary buyers are handed without explanation and the one that decides whether a number can carry a decision.

• Banding

  Also called Score banding, Confidence banding

  Banding reports a score as a range rather than a point, on the reasoning that differences smaller than the measurement error are not real differences. Candidates whose scores fall inside the same band are treated as equivalent, and any ordering among them is decided on other evidence rather than on the score.

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• Base rate

  Also called Base rate of success, Prior probability of success

  The base rate is the proportion of applicants who would perform satisfactorily if they were hired with no assessment at all. It sets the headroom available to a selection procedure: where almost everyone would succeed anyway, or almost nobody would, even a highly valid test has very little left to add.

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