Countertalk: Real World Challenges the Focus of ASE Certification

One of the issues that I hear most often about from jobbers is the lack of competent counterpeople. Business owners tell me it is a limiting factor in their ability to serve customers and even expand to new markets.

In general, it is a problem both how few individuals are entering the trade as well as how they are trained when they do. While formal classroom training has its place, they tell me, there is no substitute for the real world.

And that is exactly why ASE Parts Specialist Certification exams were created. They are not the product of a bunch of academics sitting around a classroom thinking they know what a counterperson should know; each exam question has been created and critiqued by counterpeople, business owners, and, occasionally, a member of the trade press.

A number of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a test question writing workshop. It was an eye-opener to be sure, but has served as the basis for my personal confidence in the testing’s ability to reward the professional counterperson without penalizing him for a lack of theoretical knowledge.

Here’s how the process works.

Before the first question is written at a workshop, auto parts professionals review and modify the existing job tasks necessary for a professional to practice successfully in a particular job category. The addition of electronic cataloguing functions is a good example of this. The result is an up-to-date “task list” of what a counterperson does.

Individual test questions are written to correspond to these tasks. Questions must meet a number of criteria regarding importance, format, clarity, significance of content, etc. In the workshop in which I participated, each question was floated and critiqued until we homed in on its core, eliminating ambiguities that could lead to incorrect answers.

We ended up throwing some questions out completely, but most ended up quite a bit different from the initial suggestion. There was a lot of discussion to get to the point where we and the folks from ASE would accept a question.

Whenever new questions are written, they are submitted for pre-testing. Pre-testing means including the new questions in actual ASE tests to determine the questions’ performance, though test takers aren’t told which questions are being evaluated. Questions being pre-tested don’t affect the test scores. I have no idea how many of our questions made it through this stage.

Questions that perform well–meaning that on average competent test writers answered them correctly, while those who did less well did not–would likely end up as part of the scored test question pool. If everybody gets a question wrong or the correct answers don’t correlate to how well the test writer did on the rest of the questions, it may be sent to a future workshop where the question will be either discarded or modified and pre-tested again.

The process is never-ending. Question writing workshops occur biennially for each exam. And they are constantly being updated. Since I participated, the Parts Specialist category has expanded from the simple P1 heavy duty and P2 passenger car/light truck tests to include five tests: Automobile Parts Specialist, Medium/Heavy Truck Dealership Parts Specialist, Medium/Heavy Truck Aftermarket Brake Parts Specialist, Medium/Heavy Truck Aftermarket Suspension and Steering Parts Specialist, and General Motors Parts Consultant. Each test covers questions on communication and sales skills, vehicle systems knowledge, vehicle identification, cataloguing skills, and inventory management.

While no system is perfect, I believe that business owners and counterpeople can be confident that their performance in the real world has a good chance of being reflected in their performance on the ASE Parts Specialist Certification process.