Identical Errors and Deception
Henry F. Dickenson · The Journal of Educational Research · 1945
Some years ago deception by college and high school students dis rupted completely the construction of a Group Rational Learning Test. It was necessary to abandon the test construction until a technique was devised for the elimination of deception errors. Students had to be seated compactly for test purposes, and some would invariably peek at neighbors' answers. Individualizing the administration of the test, through unique patterns for each subject, solved that problem. 2It amounted, figuratively, to placing each subject in an individual booth by surrounding him with students hav ing unknown answer patterns. The control and experimental groups set up proved valuable in shed ding light on the relative number of identical errors for control and experi mental groups. This experimenting with patterns, likewise, revealed the necessity for a particular identical errors percentage range for each sep arate test item type. Here, Identical Errors, refers to the percentage obtained by dividing the number of like errors by one's total errors. Table I was derived by first determining the actual number of differ ent ways two students may answer different items. Take a dual-choice item for example, two subjects (1 & 2) may answer in any of the following ways: (Tx F2), (Tt T2), (Fx T2) and (Fx F2). Here a two-choice item has four possible response combinations. Two of these (T j T2) and (Fx F2) are identical responses. One is the answer to the test item, the other is an identical error for each student.