ACEDS Certification Exam Nears Completion as Experts Hone 78 E-Discovery ‘Tasks’ for Testing
Teams of e-discovery experts from around the US are putting the finishing touches on the first examination that will confer professional accreditation to specialists in the burgeoning new field of electronic discovery.
The testing experts are putting the proposed questions under a microscope to assure clarity, relevance, lack of ambiguity, and appropriateness before they are approved for inclusion in the landmark certification exam that will be released Nov. 1.
Undergoing all that scrutiny are more than 200 "items," the word that psychometricians use for questions that will appear on the exam, which will be offered at more than 320 locations in the United States and Canada.
Candidates who pass the rigorous certification examination will earn the Certified E-Discovery Specialist (CEDS) credential.
The testing centers are monitored by the respected psychometric firm, Kryterion, which has been advising the sponsoring organization, the Association of Certified Electronic Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), throughout the process of constructing the examination, which began early this year.
"It’s important to be working closely with Kryterion," said Gregory Calpakis, executive director of ACEDS. "They have been with us every step of the way, from the job task analysis to item editing and review sessions, and will be there through beta testing and item response analysis."
The teams of experts that meet for the frequent item review sessions were recruited from a pool of more than 40 e-discovery professionals who have volunteered to take part in the certification effort.
"What’s unique about this e-discovery certification is the formulation of the entire process upon psychometrically-sound principles," said Calpakis. Psychometrics is the study of knowledge and educational assessment, including the processes for constructing valid and defensible measurement tests.
The entire process is described in a document that ACEDS released in early September called "The ABCs of ACEDS Certification," which includes 78 e-discovery job tasks categorized into 15 major areas that the examination will test.
Among the areas to be tested are project planning and preparing the e-discovery budget. Candidates for certification must be able to identify critical steps to building the e-discovery team and budget, and understand challenges of third-party hosted and stored electronically stored information (ESI). Another major topic is litigation-hold implementation, where candidates must be able to determine the sources of ESI and the elements of legal hold implementation plans and legal hold notices, and must identify proper means of implementing a legal hold notice and its impact on ESI storage locations.
In addition to understanding litigation hold implementation and the overarching legal framework and obligation of data preservation, candidates must have an understanding of data processing and data culling techniques. For instance, the exam will test how to validate processed data, and data deduplication and its applications.
Under the umbrella of technology expertise, exam-takers will be tested on cloud computing concepts, such as how web-based storage and email function. Other technology issues on the exam include the data of social networking sites, and the risks and benefits of off-site data storage and access.
For interested professionals, ACEDS also offers a CEDS Examination Study Guide and Candidate Handbook. For more information and progress updates, visit ACEDS.org.
