Comparability of Essay Question Variants GRE
- Author(s):
- Bridgeman, Brent; Trapani, Catherine S.; Bivens-Tatum, Jennifer
- Publication Year:
- 2014
- Source:
- Wendler, Cathy; Bridgeman, Brent (eds.) with assistance from Chelsea Ezzo. The Research Foundation for the GRE revised General Test: A Compendium of Studies. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 2014, p1.10.1-1.10.4
- Document Type:
- Chapter
- Page Count:
- 4
- Subject/Key Words:
- Graduate Record Examination (GRE), Revised GRE, Test Revision, Item Variants, Essay Tests, Analytical Writing, Essay Prompts, Ethnic Differences, Gender Differences
Abstract
Describes a study that explored issues related to essay variants. Essay variants are created from the same prompt; a specific prompt (parent) is used as the basis for one or more variants that specify different writing tasks in response to the parent prompt. The study examined the comparability of score distributions across Analytical Writing prompts and their variants, differential difficulty of variant types across subgroups, and the consistency of reader scores across prompts and variants. Results indicated that for both issue and argument variants the average differences were quite small, no significant interaction with race/ethnicity or gender was seen, and no variant type appeared to have more or less rater reliability than the other.