How assessment analytics can help to improve reliability, efficiency, and fairness of entrance examinations

Abstract

The study examined the level of difficulty, discrimination, and reliability of multiple-choice questions [MCQs] in Finnish national Law entrance examinations. The purpose was to assess whether MCQs could be used to rank applicants in a sufficiently reliable manner. The data set consists of anonymized scores from three exams (years 2018, 2019, 2021) containing 11, 201 applicants all together. The study found that the MCQs provide a reliable, adequate, and high-quality discrimination. MCQ scores were also shown to correlate with essays and total scores. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)