A set of test questions is first administered to a small group of people deemed to be representative of the population for which the final test is intended. The trial run is planned to provide a check on instructions for administering and taking the test and for intended time allowances, and it can also reveal ambiguities in the test content. After adjustments, surviving items are administered to a larger, ostensibly representative group. The resulting data permit computation of a difficulty index for each item (often taken as the percentage of the subjects who respond correctly) and of an item-test or item-subtest discrimination index (e.g., a coefficient of correlation specifying the relationship of each item with total test score or subtest score).

If it is feasible to do so, measures of the relation of each item to independent criteria (e.g., grades earned in school) are obtained to provide item validation. Items that are too easy or too difficult are discarded; those within a desired range of difficulty are identified. If internal consistency is sought, items that are found to be unrelated to either a total score or an appropriate subtest score are ruled out, and items that are related to available external criterion measures are identified. Those items that show the most efficiency in predicting an external criterion (highest validity) usually are preferred over those that contribute only to internal consistency (reliability).

Estimates of reliability for the entire set of items, as well as for those to be retained, commonly are calculated. If the reliability estimate is deemed to be too low, items may be added. Each alternative in multiple-choice items also may be examined statistically. Weak incorrect alternatives can be replaced, and those that are unduly attractive to higher scoring subjects may be modified.

Cross validation

Item-selection procedures are subject to chance errors in sampling test subjects, and statistical values obtained in pretesting are usually checked (cross validated) with one or more additional samples of subjects. Typically, it is found that cross-validation values tend to shrink for many of the items that emerged as best in the original data, and further items may be found to warrant discard. Measures of correlation between total test score and scores from other, better known tests are often sought by test users.

Differential weighting

Some test items may appear to deserve extra, positive weight; some answers in multiple-choice items, though keyed as wrong, seem better than others in that they attract people who earn high scores generally. The bulk of theoretical logic and empirical evidence, nonetheless, suggests that unit weights for selected items and zero weights for discarded items and dichotomous (right versus wrong) scoring for multiple-choice items serve almost as effectively as more complicated scoring. Painstaking efforts to weight items generally are not worth the trouble.

Negative weight for wrong answers is usually avoided as presenting undue complication. In multiple-choice items, the number of answers a subject knows, in contrast to the number he gets right (which will include some lucky guesses), can be estimated by formula. But such an average correction overpenalizes the unlucky and underpenalizes the lucky. If the instruction is not to guess, it is variously interpreted by persons of different temperament; those who decide to guess despite the ban are often helped by partial knowledge and tend to do better.

A responsible tactic is to try to reduce these differences by directing subjects to respond to every question, even if they must guess. Such instructions, however, are inappropriate for some competitive speed tests, since candidates who mark items very rapidly and with no attention to accuracy excel if speed is the only basis for scoring; that is, if wrong answers are not penalized.