The analysis of Iran universities’ 2003-2004 entrance examination to detect biased items

Abstract

Item bias or differential item function (DIF) refers to the situation in which the probability of correct responses to an item for examinees with equal ability measured by test but belong to different groups are not equal. The existence of bias in items decreases the validity of the test. In this study the range of item difficulty among surveyed groups, has been used as a method for detecting the item bias in Persian literature subtest as part of the Entrance Examination to Universities of Iran in 2003-2004. For this purpose, report cards of 5000 (each group of 1000 examinees) participants in this examination from three provinces i.e. Yazd, Azerbaijan Sharghi and Kurdistan as sample groups were analyzed using the computerized program, BILOG-MG. Out of 25, two items, numbers 9 and 10 showed bias between gender groups and both were in favour of female group and were identified as biased items. Of this number, four items numbers 2, 7, 9, and 12 showed bias among linguistic groups.