Computer Software Application in Item Analysis of Exams in a College of Medicine

Abstract

MCQ exams need to be item analyzed to assess students. Computer software is used to perform this task reliably. This cross sectional study was performed on 40 MCQ exams including 2445 multiple choice question items using a software. The difficult and discrimination index in addition to Cronbach's alpha was calculated for every questions and exams by LERTAP 5.0 software from ASC-USA. In addition, mean value for each index for the tests was calculated by SPSS:Pc16.0.The result of statistical analysis revealed that the mean of item difficulty and discrimination index of the exams used at the college of medicine were 0.49 and 0.19, respectively. In addition, the mean of coefficient alpha for the entire tests was 0.74. Only in 12 percent of the questions all the distracters were distracting. The mean of difficulty and discrimination index of MCQ exams of college of medicine was 0.68 and 0.19. These values were close to the recommended values suggested by experts in the field, however, a considerable frequency of these indexes by some tests were low. Further research is needed to construct better tests.