Rasch analysis for the evaluation of rank of student response time in multiple choice examinations

The availability of computerized testing has broadened the scope of person assessment beyond the usual accuracy-ability domain to include response time analyses. Because there are contexts in which speed is important, e.g. medical practice, it is important to develop tools by which individuals can be evaluated for speed. In this paper, the ability of Rasch measurement to convert ordinal nonparametric rankings of speed to measures is examined and compared to similar measures derived from parametric analysis of response times (pace) and semi-parametric logarithmic time-scaling procedures. Assuming that similar spans of the measures were used, non-parametric methods of raw ranking or percentile-ranking of persons by questions gave statistically acceptable person estimates of speed virtually identical to the parametric or semi-parametric methods. Because no assumptions were made about the underlying time distributions with ranking, generality of conclusions was enhanced. The main drawbacks of the non-parametric ranking procedures were the lack of information on question duration and the overall assignment by the model of variance to the person by question interaction.