ON THE VIABILITY OF SOME UNTESTABLE ASSUMPTIONS IN EQUATING EXAMS THAT ALLOW EXAMINEE CHOICE

An increasingly popular test format allows examinees to choose which i tems they will answer from among a larger set. When examinee choice is allowed, fairness requires that the different test forms, thus constr ucted, be equated for their possible differential difficulty. For this equating to be possible we need to know how well examinees would have answered the items that they did not choose. In this article we repor t the results of an experiment in which examinees are asked to choose among several multiple choice items but are then required to answer al l of them. We conclude that allowing choice while having fair tests is only possible when the choice is unnecessary.