Grégoire, Jacques
[UCL]
The ITC Guidelines for Test Adaptation Version 2 includes three new precondition guidelines that should be fulfilled before starting a test adaptation. One of them mentions the need to “obtain the necessary permission from the holder of the intellectual property rights relating to the test before carrying out any adaptation”. Intellectual property rights refer to a set of rights over creations of the human mind. They protect the interest of creators by giving them moral and economic rights over their creations. As tests are clearly creations of the human mind, they are covered by intellectual property rights. Most of the time the copyright does not refer to specific item contents, but to the original organization of the test (structure of the scales, scoring system, organization of the material…). Consequently, mimicking an existing test (i.e. keeping the structure of the original test and its scoring system, but creating new items), is a breach of the original intellectual property rights. When authorized to carry out an adaptation, the test developer should respect the original characteristics of the test (structure, material, format, scoring…), unless an agreement from the holder of the intellectual property allows modifications of these characteristics. In this presentation, we discuss the issue of conducting a test adaptation (i.e. developing a version of the original test taking into account new linguistic and cultural constraints) respecting intellectual property rights.


Bibliographic reference |
Grégoire, Jacques. Test adaptation and intellectual property rights .10th ITC Conference (Vancouvert, Canada, du 01/07/2016 au 04/07/2016). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/252896 |