Open AccessITEM DIFFICULTY ADJUSTMENT STUDY: GRE VERBAL DISCRETES
Author(s) -
Adams Richard,
Carson John,
Cureton Kevin
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
ets research report series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.235
H-Index - 5
ISSN - 2330-8516
DOI - 10.1002/j.2333-8504.1992.tb01510.x
Subject(s) - sentence , psychology , cognitive psychology , natural language processing , order (exchange) , arithmetic , linguistics , artificial intelligence , computer science , mathematics , philosophy , finance , economics
The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is both possible and cost‐effective to revise middle‐difficulty GRE discrete items in order to produce items of higher or lower difficulty. It was found that it is significantly easier to increase the difficulty of middle‐difficulty items than to reduce the difficulty of such items, and that the difficulties of antonyms and analogies are much easier to manipulate than those of sentence completions. The evidence also suggests that producing harder analogies and antonyms by revising items in this manner would be a cost‐effective procedure.