An innovative parallel test sheet composition approach to meet multiple assessment criteria for national tests

The national certification tests and entrance examinations are the most important tests for proving the ability or knowledge level of a person. To accurately evaluate the professional skills or knowledge level, the composed test sheets must meet multiple assessment criteria such as the ratio of relevant concepts to be evaluated and the estimated testing time. Furthermore, to fairly compare the knowledge levels of the persons who receive different national tests and to avoid unexpected situations due to weather, accidents, etc., a set of parallel test sheets with identical test ability need to be composed, which is almost impossible to be accomplished manually. To cope with this problem, an innovative approach is proposed to efficiently compositing parallel test sheets from very large item banks, while meeting multiple assessment criteria. Moreover, a computer-assisted testing system was developed and a series of experiments were conducted to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the innovative approach.