At 01:34 AM 6/16/01 -0500, Jay Warner wrote:
>but Doug Sawyer did not ask exactly that question. What he _may_ be asking
>is whether a bank of questions could be developed, that are more or less
>independent of one another,
you mean uncorrelated??? across the same set of examinees when
administered?? if so ... you don't have a collection of items that can form
a scale ... what would they be measuring?
> and when administered to a group of students,
>produce a mostly Normal distribution. I can't say about the effects of
>question order, but I will bet that if you test a group of students (measure
>their X - capability, accomplishment, memorization...) the grades will
>fall more or less on a Normal dist.
it depends on how difficult you make these items and the groups you give
them to ... if all these items are very simple ... or very hard ... then
your distribution will probably be seriously skewed on way or the other ...
the fact that you CAN make a test score distribution come out to be
basically normal is a combination of knowing the difficulty of the pool of
items you have and knowing the examinees to whom you will be administering
the test
>Jay
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