Whitepaper

The Complete Guide to Testing Editing Skills for HR

Published 22 September 2026

In its guidance for job applicants, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission uses a proofreading test as an example. An employer gives a written test for a proofreading position, and an applicant with dyslexia asks for a different format. The Commission's answer is that the employer does not have to change the format, "because the job itself requires an ability to read."¹ The test in that example measures the work the job requires, which is the principle every editing test has to meet.

A job analysis comes before the test

The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures are the federal rules that govern employment testing in the United States. They describe how a test can be supported by content validity, which applies "to the extent that it is a representative sample of the content of the job."² The same section asks for a job analysis first. That analysis covers the important work behaviors and, where the work produces something, "an analysis of the work product(s)."² For an editor, the work product is the edited document.

The first practical step is therefore a list rather than a test. It records which documents the new hire will handle, at which stage of editing, and for which readers. A legal publisher, a university press, and a software company can all advertise for a copy editor and mean three different jobs.

Editors Canada divides the work into structural editing, stylistic editing, copy editing, and proofreading.³ The Editorial Freelancers Association uses developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, and proofreading.⁴ The two sets of terms overlap without matching exactly, so a job analysis that names tasks is more useful than one that names a title.

The test should resemble the documents

The Guidelines state the principle directly: "The closer the content and the context of the selection procedure are to work samples or work behaviors, the stronger is the basis for showing content validity."² The 2014 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, written by the testing profession, describe building a job sample test from tasks that experts rate highly for importance, criticality, or frequency.⁵ A passage for a medical publisher's copy editor should therefore read like the medical publisher's copy. A set of isolated grammar questions measures knowledge of rules. A passage edited to a house style is closer to the work itself.

Score the changes, including the ones not made

An editing test produces a marked-up document, and the way it is scored decides what it measures. The Editors Canada standards supply usable criteria. An editor should "make all changes without altering the intended meaning or introducing errors."³ Changes should stay "within the scope of the project and the stage of editing."³ An editor should also "use judgment about when to query and when to resolve problems without consultation."³

Each of those criteria can be scored. A candidate who rewrites a sentence that needed only a comma has changed the author's wording without cause. A candidate who corrects every planted error but introduces two new ones has not produced a clean document. A proofreading candidate who restructures paragraphs has worked beyond the stage the job requires. A key that counts only corrected errors records none of these three results.

EditingTests.com scores editing and proofreading work by comparing the candidate's tracked changes against a master-corrected version of the same passage, and a person reviews the result before the employer receives it. Grammar and vocabulary tests, by contrast, are scored automatically against an answer key. The validity and research page sets out both methods.

A cutoff describes acceptable work

The Guidelines say that cutoff scores "should normally be set so as to be reasonable and consistent with normal expectations of acceptable proficiency within the work force."² They also separate screening from ranking. Evidence that supports a pass or fail decision "may be insufficient to support the use of the same procedure on a ranking basis."² A pass mark works best when it is written as a description of acceptable work in that particular job. A score that separates adequate candidates from inadequate ones makes a different claim from a score that orders ten adequate candidates from first to tenth.

One piece of evidence among several

The EEOC advises that no test "should be implemented without an understanding of its effectiveness and limitations for the organization."⁶ A 2022 review of personnel selection research concluded that the validity of many selection procedures "has been substantially overestimated." It reduced mean validity estimates by .10 to .20 points, while finding that the procedures "remain useful."⁷ An editing test shows what a candidate did with one passage under one set of conditions. Interviews, references, and published work add evidence the test cannot supply.

Accommodation belongs in the plan from the start. Regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act require a test to reflect the skill it "purports to measure."⁸ An impaired sensory, manual, or speaking skill should not decide the result unless that skill is what the test measures. The EEOC also permits an employer to describe the hiring process to every applicant, including a "timed written test," and to ask whether an accommodation will be needed.¹ That guidance does not settle whether extra time suits a timed editing test, which remains a question for the employer and its advisers.

A candidate's answers and results are released to the employer who sent the invitation, and EditingTests.com does not sell personal data. The site supplies the test and the scoring. The hiring decision, and any question of employment law, stays with the employer and its counsel.

Notes

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Job Applicants and the ADA," October 7, 2003. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/job-applicants-and-ada ↩
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and others, Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, 29 CFR Part 1607, sections 1607.5 and 1607.14, CFR 2024 edition. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XIV/part-1607 ↩
Editors Canada, Professional Editorial Standards 2024, standards A2.5, A12.2 and A13.1. https://editors.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/EditorsCanada_ProfessionalEditorialStandards_2024.pdf ↩
Editorial Freelancers Association, "Editorial Service Definitions," accessed September 22, 2026. https://www.the-efa.org/editorial-services-definitions/ ↩
American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education, Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, 2014 edition, chapter 1. https://www.testingstandards.net/open-access-files.html ↩
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "Employment Tests and Selection Procedures," December 1, 2007. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-selection-procedures ↩
Paul R. Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry, and Filip Lievens, "Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates of Validity in Personnel Selection," Journal of Applied Psychology 107, no. 11 (2022): 2040-2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994 ↩
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 29 CFR 1630.11, "Administration of tests," CFR 2024 edition. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2024-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-2024-title29-vol4-sec1630-11.xml ↩