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The EBAS assessment has been evaluated in a peer-reviewed study of 562 completed responses. The study found that the five domains hold up as distinct measures, that agreement between graders is within accepted standards, and that the instrument distinguishes performance across a wide range of ability.
This article says “domain” because that is the technical term in psychometric research. Elsewhere on this site the same five are called categories, and the fraud domain is the Misrepresentation and Fraud category.
What was studied
More than 100 participants completed the assessment across the five domains: fraud, boundaries, substance abuse, unprofessional conduct, and professional standards, for 562 completed responses in all. Trained graders scored each response against the four-point rubric. Most responses were relevant and substantive, which matters for a constructed-response instrument, because a prompt that produces thin answers cannot discriminate between them.
What the analysis found
A confirmatory factor analysis tested whether the five domains stand independently while still forming one larger picture of ethical awareness, and both held. The domains are related but separate, which is the balance a multi-part instrument needs.
Each domain also showed strong internal consistency, meaning the items within it measure the same underlying skill. Agreement between graders, measured by intraclass correlation, was within accepted standards.
An item response theory analysis showed the assessment separates performance from early understanding through to advanced reasoning, rather than clustering everyone in the middle. Low correlation between unrelated domains indicates the instrument is not measuring one thing and reporting it five times, and is not picking up systematic bias across types of item.
What the structure means for a board
Because the domains hold up separately, a board can act on a low score in a single domain. Because they also share a common factor, results across several domains can be read together as one picture of a licensee’s reasoning, so the same instrument can serve a narrow question about one type of conduct and a broad question about general reasoning.
For most cases the standing guidance is three or more assessments, because a single assessment covers a single scenario and several show whether the reasoning holds across situations. For how to choose which ones, see How to Choose the Right Categories for a Case.
The published study
The study was published in February 2026 in Ethics & Behavior, a peer-reviewed journal from Taylor & Francis, under the title Evaluating ethical competence after misconduct: evidence from the EBAS assessment tool. The full text is available from the publisher.
