Jambites are complain about their results let see what this IRT is all about.
Imagine for a second that you’re teaching a math remediation course full of fourth graders. You’ve just administered a test with 10 questions. Of those 10 questions, two questions are trivial, two are incredibly hard, and the rest are equally difficult. Now imagine that two of your students take this test and answer nine of the 10 questions correctly. The first student answers an easy question incorrectly, while the second answers a hard question incorrectly. How would you try to identify the student with higher ability? Under a traditional grading approach, you would assign both students a score of 90 out of 100, grant both of them an A, and move on to the next test. This approach illustrates a key problem with measuring student ability via testing instruments: test questions do not have uniform characteristics. So how can we measure student ability while accounting for differences in questions? Item response theory (IRT) attempts to model student ability using question level performance instead of aggregate test level performance. Instead of assuming all questions contribute equally to our understanding of a student’s abilities, IRT provides a more nuanced view on the information each question provides about a student. What kind of features can a question have? Let’s consider some examples. First, think back to an exam you have previously taken. Sometimes you breeze through the first section, work through a second section of questions, then battle with a final section until the exam ends. In the traditional grading paradigm described earlier, a correct answer on the first section would count just as much as a correct answer on the final section, despite the fact that the first section is easier than the last! Similarly, a student demonstrates greater ability as she answers harder questions correctly; the traditional grading scheme, however, completely ignores each question’s difficulty when grading students!