A Hybrid Strategy to Construct Multistage Adaptive Tests

How to effectively construct multistage adaptive test (MST) panels is a topic that has spurred recent advances. The most commonly used approaches for MST assembly use one of two strategies: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach splits the whole test into several modules, and each module is built first, then all modules are compiled to obtain the whole test, while the top-down approach follows the opposite direction. Both methods have their pros and cons, and sometimes neither is convenient for practitioners. This study provides an innovative hybrid strategy to build optimal MST panels efficiently most of the time. Empirical data and results by using this strategy will be provided.