Questionmark and the CareerTech Testing Center

I wanted to let you know that you can now access the CareerTech Testing Center Blog at Questionmark!

Questionmark’s mission is to provide the highest quality testing and assessment software and support services to enable individuals and organizations reach their goals. Questionmark has powered the CareerTech Testing Center's online testing system for years and we are looking forward to an even brighter future with them.

They have also recently created their own Questionmark Blog which I highly recommend.

Take a look at a recent post by Greg Pope, Analytics and Psychometrics Manager for Questionmark:

Psychometrics 101: Item Total Correlation

The item total correlation is a correlation between the question score (e.g., 0 or 1 for multiple choice) and the overall assessment score (e.g., 67%). It is expected that if a participant gets a question correct they should, in general, have higher overall assessment scores than participants who get a question wrong. Similarly with essay type question scoring where a question could be scored between 0 and 5 participants who did a really good job on the essay (got a 4 or 5) should have higher overall assessment scores (maybe 85-90%). This relationship is shown in an example graph below.


This relationship in psychometrics is called ‘discrimination’ referring to how well a question differentiates between participants who know the material and those that do not know the material. Participants who know the material taught to them should get high scores on questions and high overall assessment scores. Participants who did not master the material should get low scores on questions and lower overall assessment scores. This is the relationship that an item-total correlation provides to help evaluate the performance of questions. We want to have lots of highly discriminating questions on our tests because they are the most fine-tuned measurements to find out what participants know and can do.

When looking at an item-total correlation generally negative values are a major red flag it is unexpected that participants who get low scores on the questions get high scores on the assessment. This could indicate a mis-keyed question or that the question was highly ambiguous and confusing to participants. Values for an item-total correlation (point-biserial) between 0 and 0.19 may indicate that the question is not discriminating well, values between 0.2 and 0.39 indicate good discrimination, and values 0.4 and above indicate very good discrimination.

Thanks again to Greg and QuestionMark for sharing all of the great information! J.T.