Higher education institutions need to develop valid, fair, and objective selection methods. Current literature reporting the development and validation of new national large-scale selection tests is scarce. This two-phased study aimed to (1) develop and (2) evaluate the validity of the Finnish digital Universities of Applied Sciences Entrance…

This report describes the process of developing and validating the enhanced ACT. The report describes the changes made to the test content and the processes by which these design decisions were implemented. The authors describe how they shared the overall scope of the enhancements, including the initial blueprints, with external expert panels,…

Over the last five years, tremendous strides have been made in advancing the AIG methodology required to produce items in diverse content areas. However, the one content area where enormous problems remain unsolved is language arts, generally, and reading comprehension, more specifically. While reading comprehension test items can be created using…

As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

Over the past several years, content experts, psychometricians, and researchers have been hard at work developing, refining, and studying the digital SAT. The work is grounded in foundational best practices and advances in measurement and assessment design, with fairness for students informing all of the work done. This paper shares learnings from…

This study uses mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) to construct multiple highly equivalent item pools simultaneously, and compares the results from mixed integer programming (MIP). Three different MIP/MIQP models were implemented and evaluated using real CAT item pool data with 23 different content areas and a goal of equal information…

Previous research on calculator use in standardized assessments of quantitative ability focused on the effect of calculator availability on item difficulty and on whether test developers can predict these effects. With the introduction of an on-screen calculator on the Quantitative Reasoning measure of the "GRE"® revised General Test, it…

Since the Spanish Educational system is changing and promoting the use of online tests, it was necessary to study the transformation of test items in the "Spanish University Entrance Examination" (IB P.A.U.) to diminish the effect of test delivery changes (through its computerization) in order to affect the least the current model. The…

Although there is an increasing number of online tests in the world, little research is currently known in Spain today. Assessment has become an integral part of education and the implications of the various uses of language testing go beyond the educational settings (Douglas, 2010; Fulcher, 2010). This study describes the PAULEX project. This…

Language testing is a relatively new field of interest that has become of common interest in the last twenty years not only for traditional purposes but because of the power that language testing has acquired in relation to immigration and also for its implications for educational reforms. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical…

Over the past four decades, there has been incremental growth in computer-based testing (CBT) as a viable alternative to paper-and-pencil testing. However, the transition to CBT is neither easy nor inexpensive. As Drasgow, Luecht, and Bennett (2006) noted, many design engineering, test development, operations/logistics, and psychometric changes…

The recent literature on computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has developed methods for creating CAT item pools from a large master pool. Each CAT pool is designed as a set of nonoverlapping forms reflecting the skill levels of an assumed population of test takers. This article presents a Monte Carlo method to obtain these CAT pools and discusses…

This study aims to examine the feasibility of a number of technical solutions implemented in a web-based system designed for the creation and management of online language exams within PAULEX Universitas, a project for the development of an online platform to design, deliver and assess the foreign language exam within the Spanish national…

This paper presents the results of writing processing among 260 high school senior students, their degree of satisfaction using the new trial version of the Computer Based University Entrance Examination in Spain and their degree of motivation towards written online test tasks. Currently, this is one of the closing studies to verify whether…

Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test taker ability. This study incorporated testlets (bundles of items) into two-stage and multistage designs, and compared the precision of the ability estimates derived from these designs with those derived from a standard computerized adaptive test (CAT)…