Estimating the validity of a multiple-choice test item having k correct alternatives

Abstract

In various situations, a multiple-choice test item may have more than one correct alternative, and the goal is to determine how many correct alternatives an examinee actually knows. For a randomly sampled examinee, the validity of an item is defined as the probability of deciding that the examinee knows i correct alternatives, when in fact exactly i correct alternatives are known. This article describes how latent class models can be used to estimate this probability.