Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here for more information on Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology, 3e

Click here for more information on Research and Evaluation in Education and Psychology, 3e

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Applied Psychological Measurement
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Weitzman, R.A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Sequential Testing for Selection

R.A. Weitzman

Naval Postgraduate School

In sequential testing for selection, an applicant for school or work responds via a computer terminal to one item at a time until an acceptance or rejection decision can be made with a preset probability of error. The test statistic, as a function of item difficulties for standardization subgroups scoring within successive quantiles of the criterion, is an approximation of a Waldian probability ratio that should improve as the number of quantiles increases. Monte carlo simulation of 1,000 first-year college students under 96 different testing conditions indicated that a quantile number as low as four could yield observed error rates that are close to their nominal values with mean test lengths between 5 and 47. Application to real data, for which interpolative estimation of the quantile item difficulties was necessary, produced, with quantile numbers of four and five, even more accurate observed error rates than the monte carlo studies did. Truncation at 70 items narrowed the range of mean test lengths for the real data to between 5 and 19. Important for use in selection, the critical values of the test statistics are functions not only of the nominal error rates but also, alternatively, of the selection ratio, the base-rate success probability, and the success probability among selectees, which a test user is free to choose.

Applied Psychological Measurement, Vol. 6, No. 3, 337-351 (1982)
DOI: 10.1177/014662168200600310
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?