ACS Examinations Institute Board of Trustees Fall 2026

The Exams Institute is proud to announce a variety of new products aimed at further diversifying available assessment metrics in chemical education. There are a great number of new online practice exams for different combinations of general and organic chemistry terms. The Institute has moved toward accessibility of its products in two (2) major ways: conversion of printed materials to unique large print exams and digitization of classroom practice materials. These requests continue to rise in number over time and we are always innovating to see such requests through, often with tight timelines.

Demand continues to rise for custom exams, with second highest total of tests from Spring 2026. We highlighted custom exams at BCCE, in conjunction with a number of other products. We are also continuing to market our workshop series. Offered in flexible packages with the ability to select the components that match the needs of the attendees, there are 5 potential workshops: creating/revising learning outcomes; course and programmatic assessment; creating a test specification; writing, editing, and evaluating test items; and scoring test items and closing the assessment loop. Each runs approximately 2 to 3 hours. A workshop was offered at 2YC3 at the end of May which was well-received and well-attended. A similar workshop was be given at BCCE (Sunday morning), focusing on creating/revising learning outcomes, creating a test specification, and scoring items. A workshop at The Ohio State University with faculty and instructors is planned for summer 2027.

Occasionally, larger institutions report that our exam products are too easy and the scores don’t inform the institutions due to ceiling effects. We have investigated the stability of norms using more homogeneous sets of institutions as well as more homogeneous score grouping (loading with higher or lower performing cases). We plan to market these options as a one-time fee to generate custom norms suited to institution-types or program needs. Because this would align to an existing exam, other than the norm generation, no printing or test building is required. We announced this at the BCCE expo and will be in our fall marketing campaign.

In 2026, we have released final norms for GC21 (Feb), GC22S (Feb) and AN22 (July). We have also released preliminary norms for IN22D and PH21C. Additionally, with sufficient trial data, we also have some tests released with modeled norms (GC25F, OR23, PC25 and TP26). There are also a number of exams currently in development, including variations of general chemistry, organic chemistry, high school chemistry, DUCK, and biochemistry. We are very excited to say that all committees are now using a test development app. The app provides important information to us outside of the test committee activities including: (1) automatic designation of specific content areas - allows us to set up the enhanced score reports automatically without the additional work by the committee. This is an excellent selling point for our newer exams as this level of detail is often sought by faculty for classroom and programmatic assessment. Subscores for specific content areas are provided for each student as well as in aggregate for the class. This also provides additional time for the committee to evaluate and assign partial credit values (also used then in enhanced score reports); (2) full test specification – When evaluating the archives and all of the information curated for past exams as well as providing setup information for new committees, one of the most obvious missing pieces of information is the test specification. With the app in use by all test committees, we have all levels of detail captured and available for the next committee.

Finally, we have reported previously on our norm reduction tool. This online tool can be used to “customize” norms for our high-use exams by selecting which items they would like excluded from the norms. The tool is made possible by using only dichotomous data, thus eliminating the need for making secure files accessible (which would need to include the key). We continue to highlight this in marketing campaigns. Data shows that usage of our website for norm reduction over the last three months with peaks during testing season as expected and higher than in fall. Data shows usage highest for general chemistry full-year exams (23%) followed by organic full-year exams (19%) and general second-term exams (13%).