As noted by Fremer and Olson, analysis of answer changes is often used to investigate testing irregularities because the analysis is readily performed and has proven its value in practice. Researchers such as Belov, Sinharay and Johnson, van der Linden and Jeon, van der Linden and Lewis, and Wollack, Cohen, and Eckerly have suggested several…

An increasing concern of producers of educational assessments is fraudulent behavior during the assessment (van der Linden, 2009). Benefiting from item preknowledge (e.g., Eckerly, 2017; McLeod, Lewis, & Thissen, 2003) is one type of fraudulent behavior. This article suggests two new test statistics for detecting individuals who may have…

An important problem in psychological test theory is the development of a sound method for determining whether a test which purports to measure the level of a certain ability is, in reality, significantly contaminated by one or more other abilities displayed by persons taking the test. Because of the large number of private and governmental…

Two approaches of statistical testing are critically reviewed. A new approach, which is a hybrid of the two, is proposed. The new approach requires the researcher to think about the two types of potential inferential errors and an explicit alternative hypothesis of interest. (VM)

Several techniques have been developed for creating continuous smooth distributions of test norms. This paper describes two studies that explore the behavior of cubic splines in order to determine their appropriateness for use in test norming. The first study uses data from the Curriculum Referenced Tests of Mastery (CRTM) and employs two…

Four discrimination indices were compared, using score distributions which were normal, bimodal, and negatively skewed. The score distributions were systematically varied to represent the common circumstances of a military training situation using criterion-referenced mastery tests. Three 20-item tests were administered to 110 simulated subjects.…