Using multiple choice questions to examine the content of the qualifying law degree accurately and reliably: the experience of the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme

The Qualified Lawyers Transfer Scheme (QLTS) provides a route for lawyers from other jurisdictions and barristers from England and Wales to qualify as solicitors in England and Wales. One of the three tests in the QLTS, the Multiple Choice Test (MCT), uses multiple choice questions to examine the syllabus of the qualifying law degree together with some pervasive subjects from the Legal Practice Course. This paper examines the MCT in detail. Particular attention is paid to the format and structure of the questions. We describe the detailed editing which each question goes through before it is used, the statistical analysis and review which take place after an exam, and the rationale for these processes. An explanation is given of what reliability and accuracy mean and how they are measured statistically. There is also an explanation of the “Angoff method” by which pass marks are set. Finally, the paper reports on the first four sittings of the MCT and their statistical results including their reliability and accuracy. Use of the multiple choice test, though well established for examining applied knowledge in medicine and in law in other jurisdictions, is a radical departure for the assessment of law in England and Wales. The experience of QLTS has shown that a carefully constructed multiple choice test of a suitable length can assess the qualifying law degree content both reliably and accurately.     

Does Spending Time in Public Settings Contribute to the Adolescent Risk of Violent Victimization?

Objectives

Using data from a nationally representative survey of adolescents in Finland this research examined the influence of spending time in public settings on the risk of physical assault and robbery victimization.

Methods

Binary and multinomial regression models were estimated to disaggregate associations between hours spent in public settings and characteristics of the victimization incident. The amount of causality/spuriousness in the association was examined using a method of situational decomposition.

Results

Our findings indicate that: (1) an active night life (any time after 6 pm) has a strong effect on victimization for boys, whereas much of the association between night life and victimization is spurious for girls; (2) after-school activity is not a risk factor; (3) adolescents who frequent public places at night increase their risk of victimization by people they know as well as strangers; and (4) much of the risk of night time activity in public settings is alcohol-related.

Conclusions

Our research suggests that a good deal of the risk associated with spending time in public settings is a function of the victim’s own risky behavior rather than inadvertent physical contact with motivated offenders in the absence of capable guardians. In addition, this lifestyle is significantly more victimogenic for males.     

Responsible Party Government in a World of Interdependence

This article opens up the closed model of the responsibility of a national government to its national electorate by adding constraints on its capacity to enact effective economic, national security and political policies. These constraints come from policy interdependence. The European Union exerts a denationalising influence through the Council, a multinational effect through the European Parliament, and the eurozone is designed as a transnational technocracy. Intergovernmental institutions spanning continents add further constraints. The result is a growing gap between the efforts of a national government to deliver outputs that match the preferences of voters and a reduction in the capacity of national electorates to hold accountable institutions outside their country that have a major impact on national outcomes. The conclusion considers three prospective possibilities: a growing frustration with a policy-irrelevant rotation of parties in office; institutional reform at the supranational level; and a learning process in which a recognition of the constraints of interdependence leads to a change in expectations.     

UNDERSTANDING DEVELOPMENT PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION: AN ACTOR‐NETWORK PERSPECTIVE

Development projects are central to international development, yet the actual practice of their implementation is under‐researched. In particular, we know little about how practice affects project performance and about how politics is enacted within such projects. This paper investigates these knowledge gaps through analysis, using actor‐network theory (ANT), of a donor‐funded reform project in the Sri Lankan public sector. By analysing, using mobilisation, interaction and disintegration of the local and global actor‐networks that typically surround such development projects, the paper explains the project's trajectory. These actions represent the practice of politics that must, in turn, be understood in relation to network actor power: not through a static conception of ‘capacitive power’ but through the dynamic enacted concept of ‘associative power’. The paper concludes by reflecting on the contribution and limitations of ANT's local/global networks component in analysing development projects, and in providing insights for development project practice. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Betting on the Future with a Cloudy Crystal Ball? How Financial Theory Can Improve Revenue Forecasting and Budgets in the States

Accurately predicting revenue growth is nearly impossible. Predicting the peaks and valleys of the business cycle is even more hopeless. This matters because tax revenues are largely driven by economic growth. Volatile, unpredictable revenue growth causes all sorts of unpleasant responses on the part of governments, most commonly manic-depressive patterns of spending and taxing. Fortunately, modern financial economics gives us a set of tools that can be used to manage volatility. This article shows how such tools can be used to inform fiscal decision making. The focus here is state governments, but the analysis applies to all jurisdictions that face hard budget constraints and therefore must balance spending increases against revenue growth.     

Pleasing the Principal: U.S. Influence in World Bank Policymaking

How do policies in international organizations reflect the preferences of powerful institutional stakeholders? Using an underutilized data set on the conditions associated with World Bank loans, we find that borrower countries that vote with the United States at the United Nations are required to enact fewer domestic policy reforms, and on fewer and softer issue areas. Though U.S. preferences permeate World Bank decision making, we do not find evidence that borrower countries trade favors in exchange for active U.S. intervention on their behalf. Instead, we propose that U.S. influence operates indirectly when World Bank staff—consciously or unconsciously—design programs that are compatible with U.S. preferences. Our study provides novel evidence of World Bank conditionality and shows that politicized policies can result even from autonomous bureaucracies.     

Comparative Analysis of the HV1 and HV2 Regions of Human Mitochondrial DNA by Denaturing High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

Abstract:  Denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) was evaluated as a sequencing-independent means of detecting the presence of sequence differences in pair-wise mixtures of nonconcordant amplicons of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). A total of 920 pair-wise combinations of HV1 and HV2 mtDNA amplicons from 95 individuals were assayed by DHPLC for sequence concordance/nonconcordance. For the 72 combinations of amplicons from different individuals who shared identical DNA sequences, DHPLC assays consistently indicated sequence concordance between the samples. This was in 100% agreement with sequencing data. For the 849 combinations of amplicons which differed in sequence, DHPLC detected the presence of sequence nonconcordance in all but 13 assays to yield 98.5% concordance with sequencing. Thus, DHPLC can be used to detect a diversity of sequence differences (transitions, transversions, insertions, and deletions) in the mtDNA D-loop. Accordingly, DHPLC may have utility as a presumptive indicator of mtDNA sequence concordance samples, as a screen for heteroplasmy/situational mixtures, and as a means for the physical fractionation of the individual contributors to an mtDNA mixture prior to sequencing.