Application of Rasch Measurement Model in Reliability and Quality Evaluation of Examination Paper for Engineering Mathematics Courses

Most of undergraduate courses in higher institutions in Malaysia use final exam as assessment tool to measure students’ academic achievement. Good constructed items/questions on final exam would be able to measure both students’ academic achievement and their generic skills. As such, this study using Rasch Measurement Model to evaluate the reliability and quality of final exam questions Mathematics Engineering III course. The items in the examination paper were studied and items that do not measure up to expectations were identified. The item analysis provides clues to how well the content of the item yielded useful information about student ability. This study focuses on constructed items, where items must retain their relative difficulty on the equal interval scale (logit), regardless of the ability of the students that challenges the item. The analysis revealed that even though there are three misfit questions, but overall, the reliability and quality of the exam questions constructed were relatively good and calibrated with students’ learned ability.