MANAGING THE INFLUENCE OF DIF FROM BIG ITEMS: THE 1988 ADVANCED PLACEMENT HISTORY TEST AS AN EXAMPLE

Building tests out of items that individually take a substantial amount of examinee time brings with it a number of problems. One major problem is that it is often too difficult and too expensive to extensively pretest such large items. Thus, the sorts of screening for flaws that are pro forma for multiple-choice items are not often done for large items. In addition, because there are so few large items on an operational test, not counting an entire item that is found to be flawed in an operational administration may be tantamount to aborting that administration. In this article, we examine the efficacy of the alternative of continuous item weighting. This alternative is illustrated on data from the 1988 administration of the College Board's Advanced Placement History Test.