PDD Examiner Competency - Part Two - Elmer Criswell
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My impetus for writing this is two-fold, and I expect that
it will be an unpopular stance with many who read it. If I
really cared about whether or not I am popular or
agreeable to everyone who reads my articles, I shouldn't
be serving as the Editor of this Newsletter or any other
one.

After hearing the Paired Testing (Marin Protocol) standard
at the AAPP Seminar with the requirements of a competency
examination before being acceptable to the requirements of
the standard to conduct Paired Testing examinations and
then testify in court, I felt that possibly the standard
had not addressed the broader aspect of testifying in
court, period, regardless of whether or not it involves
Paired Testing.

If we are going to present ourselves as experts, then we
better be experts at what we do and what we testify to.
I don't believe that the typical voir dire will determine
a PDD Examiner's true expertise unless the attorneys
involved are proficient enough and well-versed enough in
polygraphy to properly disclose those who are not actually
experts in this field. The attorneys would normally not be
aware if the PDD Examiner took "short-cuts", made improper
modifications in a testing format, had improper question
construction, used improper quantitative evaluation
methods for the test data and a proper system of test data
analysis, etc.

A person's expertise in most voir dire's involves
determining whether or not the candidate for "expert"
danced the proper dance as far as, education, training,
continuing education, pre-set years of required
experience, publishing of articles, speaking at seminar,
doing research, etc. Many people have accomplished all of
the "paper expertise" but still can't construct a proper
examination or competently read and score a polygraph
chart.

"Paper expertise" does not make one an expert by any
means. The paired testing standard requires that a certain
number of cases that the PDD Examiner has done have to be
presented for evaluation to determine proper construction
and format, and then the PDD Examiner must evaluate 100
sets of polygraph chart for which ground truth is known
and must have 85% correct decisions. Personally, I would
prefer that the percentage be raised to 90% or even 95%.
Students of mine complain because I have not taken the
"standard" grade cut-off of 90% or higher for an "A" but
rather 95%. A grade of "A" means "excellent" or
"outstanding" - which 90% is neither. 95% is "excellent"
or "outstanding" which would equate to "competency
expertise" rather than "paper expertise."

Jack Consigli, APA's Vice-President of Law Enforcement
addressed the competency problem in the latest issue of
the "APA Newsletter". He believed that when a person
contacts APA seeking an examiner or an APA Examiner
conducts an examination, the examinee should feel
comfortable that it is being competently conducted.

Unfortunately, that is not the case since there are many
instances of APA and AAPP Examiners who do incompetent
examinations. Jim Wygant wrote an article in the most
recent issue of "Polygraph" where he addresses the problem
of a recent seminar (2002 APA Seminar) where 100 examiners
were asked to score charts and 50% scored a particular
question with a +1 or NDI (truthful) and 50% scored the
same charts with a -1 or DI (lying).

He goes on to explain some reasons why this could have
occurred with differences in training, philosophies, etc.
In other words, we are back to that same old problem Cleve
Backster has been harping about since way before I got
into the field in 1972 - standardization. A few appellate
courts have said the same thing as the reason they were
rejecting polygraph evidence - lack of standardization.

ASTM has helped to relieve this problem somewhat, but we
still have no standard as of yet on acceptable testing
formats or proper question construction - two of the three
most important "controllable: factors in the examination -
test data analysis being third (unfortunately, pre-test
interviews - obviously of extreme importance, is not a
"controllable" factor that could be standardized).

Please understand, this is not a "slam" against APA or
AAPP, it is a matter of "you can only lead the horse to
water". If the person passes the requirements of basic
polygraph training and has had a supervised internship,
there is little that can be done to make certain that they
follow the proper path after that. None of the
professional organizations could monitor their members and
the quality of their work on any regular basis, and it
could not even be accomplished if every state had
licensing because it would require full-time Quality
Control Inspectors which no state is going to fund any
time soon. Many major state and municipal law enforcement
agencies have no quality control program to keep their
examiners competent.

In my presentation at APA in Reno and at the Midwest
Regional Polygraph Seminar in Indianapolis in September,
I will be presenting examples of cases I have collected in
the last two years that were conducted by persons who are
APA and/or AAPP members and who have been qualified as
experts in court and who ran improper examinations by
seriously violating test formats, question construction
principles, in-test procedures, and/or test data analysis.

For example, a nationally-known expert did an examination
on a man accused of sexually assaulting several little
girls. The strong relevant/principal crime question was,
"Do you really believe that you are a child molester?",
and another in the test being, "Do you actually believe
that you molested those children?" If this is an example
of one of our nationally-known experts, we are in a sad
state of affairs. This person has testified in court
hundreds of times. It makes one wonder how many guilty
persons were set free when this person testified that
they were truthful on their polygraph examination.

If we ever do establish any kind of national
certification, it should include a written knowledge
examination, to include practical situations like the APA
Sex Offender Certification examination; and examination of
selected recent cases - chosen by the "certifiers" - not
those seeking certification; and a test data analysis
exercise like that of the Paired Testing ASTM Standard.
Just with a higher "correct decisions" requirement. When I
propose this, I realize that the likelihood of it ever
happening is not high. It would require a massive effort
on the part of many - but like many of you - I'm just too
tired to take on the effort. We almost had a handle on
national certification, but we lost it. The only people
who would be afraid of a national certification
requirement would be those who cannot pass the
certification standards.

In summary, we have many in our midst who should not be
doing polygraph examinations as they are practicing at
present. If they would change and "do it the right way"
(depending upon who you listen to - but some that I have
seen didn't seem to listen to anybody) or if we could
make them "do it the right way", we would have far fewer
problems and Jack Consigli's vision of having an AAPP or
APA Examiner giving a competent examination would have a
greater chance of occurring.

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