2011 Volume 7 Issue 1 Pages 67-83
The present study proposes a linking method for supplementary examinations to main university entrance examinations at an individual university. Score adjustments for university entrance examinations are conceptually a part of any linking. However, what constitutes a suitable method varies according to the situation. In the case of supplementary examinations run by an individual university, equating the scores of the different tests is easier than some other cases, such as linking scores from optional subject tests within a subject area. On the other hand, supplementary examinations involve many fewer applicants than most other exams because supplementary examinations only given in exceptional cases, such as to applicants who encountered some unavoidable disastrous situation. A complicated computational process is undesirable because that would increase the risk of an erroneous score being produced. Our proposed linking method is an application of the Tucker Method with an anchor test using two additional assumptions. Together, these allow an easy computation that adds the same constant adjustment score for all applicants taking supplementary examinations while omitting unstable parameters derived from those exams. A bootstrap simulation study was executed using a national university’s entrance examination scores as data generating populations. The results showed that average bias remained almost zero; however, variance of the estimation error was not negligibly small when the sample size was small. The swapping-rates criterion showed that the effectiveness of adjustment differed according to the distribution of the main entrance exam scores in the population. The proposed method is expected to restore some equity to the selection process.
