A student driver runs a red light. We are grateful to the examiner who fails them on the spot.
Subject-matter experts sometimes exclaim, “If anyone gets this one wrong, they should just fail the whole test!” Such make-or-break or “gating” items don’t exist in multiple-choice tests—for good reason. But performance tests often include them.
Such items pose special psychometric challenges. An essay by Wallace Judd, Ph.D., titled, “Gating Items: Unique to Performance Tests,” provides guidance on how to meet those challenges. It is the seventh in a series of white papers on performance testing.
The paper suggests that gating items should be recognized as a legitimate item type requiring different statistical treatment and different standard-setting criteria compared to conventional items.
The papers in this series are intended to be a resource for test developers, illustrating best practices in the performance-testing industry. They provide advice on performance testing topics from initial concept to test delivery.
These topics are presented in language that does not assume study in psychometrics.
The mathematics of any topics are expressed in abbreviated terms instead of the Greek alphabet, and all computations are illustrated in Excel examples.
The papers are published by Authentic Testing, leaders in the field of performance testing, in the hope that they will expand access to performance testing to a wider audience of practitioners, inspiring them to explore the possibilities inherent in performance testing.