[Discuss] Aptitude Test or Family Feud?

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

That's bizarre. It's kind of the opposite of an adaptive test, where you
get more credit for knowing the difficult answers than for knowing the easy
ones.

For those of you who have never taken an adaptive test, it's a
computer-administered multiple choice test that gets a good idea of your
knowledge of a field with far fewer questions than a standard multiple
choice test. Basically, you get progressively more difficult questions
until you miss one, then a series of questions that are somewhere near the
same level as the one you missed to more accurately determine your level.
Tests are usually looking at more than one area of expertise, so the
process is done for each one that the test covers.

The adaptive test is calibrated by giving the full non-adaptive test to a
substantial number of people and determining the patterns of the scores
that people get on each question and the correlations between results on
questions. With that data in hand, an adaptive test with very high
correlation to the results on the full test can be designed. Testing time
can be reduced by 75% with very little loss of accuracy.

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 2:57 PM Rich Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Oct 2021 13:47:49 -0400
> Ethan Schwartz <ethanms at bu.edu> wrote:
>
> > The ranked value answers _are_ logical because you get a higher
> > benefit for knowing the grossly obvious stuff: London is capital of
> > England, New York is NOT capital of France... and you receive less of
> > a benefit (or deduction) if you answer incorrectly something more
> > obscure like Malta or Antarctica.
>
> Unless you happen to live in Malta where I would expect Valletta being
> your capital to be of greatest relevance to you, and whether or not New
> York is the capital of the US is pointless trivia.
>
> What is grossly obvious to you might be entirely obscure to someone
> else.
>
> Family Feud? Nope. More like Trivial Pursuit.
>
> I dunnow, though. Maybe they're looking for people who are good at
> Trivial Pursuit. If this is the case then it's a "perfect" test. :)
>
> --
> \m/ (--) \m/
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