Let me tell you about the HAPS Steering Committee. It is made up of the chairs of various committees within the Human Anatomy & Physiology Society. These committees cover such diverse topics as Animal Use and Cadaver Use, Marketing and Membership, Communication and Safety. I’ll introduce you to the chairs of each of these committees over the next several weeks, but today I’d like to spotlight one committee in particular.
The Testing Committee came about approximately eleven (11) years ago after an enthusiastic annual conference in Phoenix (2002). During that conference, several Steering Committee (SC) chairs heard from conference attendees that we should consider building a centralized database of exam questions that all members could use. There were a few workshops that directly tied into that theme, which got these discussions percolating even more. Over the course of the next year, this topic kept popping up in Board and Steering Committee meetings until it was decided to investigate this idea. We recruited a few HAPS members to create a task force to research the idea. Their report to the SC and the Board recommended the creation of a HAPS Comprehensive Exam that could be used by multiple institutions to evaluate their course against others across the country. From there, we created a standing committee to tackle this project.
Along the way, the Curriculum & Instruction committee created a standardized set of student learning outcomes for Human Anatomy & Physiology courses. The Testing Committee decided that it made sense to design our exam around these learning outcomes. People came and went through the committee. Versions of the exam developed and were implemented at various campuses. Unfortunately, the energy began to stall as we simply didn’t have enough test questions to create a strong enough exam.
Enter Eric Sun and Curtis DeFriez. These two gentlemen became co-chairs of the Testing Committee and re-infused it with energy and focus. They sought out exam questions from the membership, sorting them according to the learning outcomes. They created different iterations of the exam to see what would work best. I have to say; they’ve put in a lot of work on this exam and it shows. It’s been amazing to see the volume of work they’ve had to go through to create our newest exam.
The Testing Committee is pleased to unveil the new Online HAPS Comprehensive Exam for this next round of testing (starting at the end of this semester – December for most of us). Working with Chi Tester software (our online testing service), we will now be able to give users almost immediate results of their testing data. We will be able to provide reliable information about that data using comparisons to institutions of similar type, size, and geographic location. If you are curious to learn more about the Online HAPS Comprehensive Exam, you can email Eric at esun@hapsconnect.org or Curtis at cdefriez@hapsconnect.org. For questions about ordering the exams, contact admin@hapsconnect.org or 1-800-448-4277 (USA). The HAPS Leadership is very proud of the work of the Testing Committee in the development of this exam and appreciate the hard work of all of its members. Pencils ready!