A Review of Uniform Test Assembly Methods for e-Testing

Abstract

To record and score examinees’ responses, ISO/IEC 23988:2007 provides global standards on the use of IT to deliver assessments to the examinees. For high-stakes test, this standard is recommending to use uniform test forms in which each form comprises a different set of items but which still must have equivalent specifications such as equivalent amounts of test information based on item response theory (IRT). However, assembly of uniform test forms suffers NP-hard problem because it is a combinational optimization problem of selecting items from an item bank. Therefore, the test assembly has made rapid progress in recent years, through the aid of information technology advances. In this paper, we introduce some typical uniform test assembly methods and compare to each other to explain their advantages and disadvantages.