EMT Policy and Procedure

4.06 Exam Item Validation

Date: 09/29/17

On a yearly basis (on or about September) the Programs Director shall conduct Exam Item Validation for all examinations administered in the EMT Training program. The exam item validation will involve the following process: 1. Aggregate data from EMT training courses including students, total scores for each exam, and whether students had a question correct or incorrect on the exam. 2. Compute the Difficulty Index by calculating what percentage of students answered the question correctly on the examination. 3. Compute the Upper Difficulty Index by calculating what percentage of the students scoring in the top 25% of the class for that exam. 4. Compute the Lower Difficulty Index by calculating what percentage of the students scoring in the bottom 25% of the class for that exam. 5. Compute the Discriminating Index by subtracting the Upper Difficulty Index from the Lower Difficulty Index. Based on the analysis above, the Programs Direct shall edit exams for the next semester with the following guidelines in mind: Difficulty Index Action 100% Item too easy – consider removal 75%-99% Discriminating Index Action 1.0 – 0.70

Item highly discriminating – review distractors to insure good distribution Item discriminating – consider revision to optimize discriminating potential Item slightly discriminating – consider revision to improve DI Item inversely discriminating – consider removal or modification

Item easy – consider modification and/or distractor analysis Item moderately difficult – analyze other questions to insure good range of scores Item very difficult – consider modification or removal

0.69 – 0.21

25%-74%

0.20%-0.01%

<25%

-1.0 – 0.00

Modified exams shall be given a new version number to indicate the date of last review (for example, version 2017.09 shall indicate revised in September 2017).

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