Does your state board exam deserve a failing grade on testing nail techs on the services they’ll be doing in the real world?

The National-Interstate Council of State Boards of Cosmetology (NIC), a nonprofit group of state boards, provides the written and/or practical exams for more than 30 U.S. states.  (Go to www.nictesting.org to see if yours is one of them.) And it needs your input, licensed nail techs. The exam bobs up for review only once every several years, so summer 2013 may be your one and only chance to help rewrite the test.

To provide your input, simply complete the NIC’s online job analysis survey, available at http://smttest.com/JobAnalysis/nicntja13/survey.aspx. You’ll be done in about 10 minutes, and you can enter to win an iPad 3 (which should remove any doubts that the test-writers really do want your feedback!).

In an e-mail to NAILS, a representative from the NIC says, “In order to maintain the legal defensibility and integrity of our national examination program, we review all of our exams every five years at minimum. The first step in this process is to bring licensed nail technicians to assist NIC in the development of a survey of every task that a nail tech may use while providing services. Once this survey is developed, NIC makes every effort to make this survey available across the US for the very important and valuable opinions of licensed nail technicians. The results of this survey are then used to begin the development of a current nail tech exam that multiple states are using.”

You can take the survey until August 31, 2013. Then we encourage you to forward the link to other licensed techs to supply their responses too: http://smttest.com/JobAnalysis/nicntja13/survey.aspx.

Illustration by Yuiko Sugino

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