The exam was revised but was comparable in terms of content, length, format, and difficulty.
As expected, because questions 4 and 5 are very similar to each other in content and format, the difficulty and discrimination indices of these two MTF-type questions are comparable (Table 1).
The strength of this approach is that we can control for individual class variation that could be due to anything that may be different among the courses (e.g., the instructor, the students, exam format, exam difficulty, or something that we have not even considered).
The tapes are said to be in a microcassette format and Eisenberg said they would have to be digitised for viewing, owing to formatting difficulties impacting declassified playback.
The system's reliance on new technologies such as the Cell microprocessor and Blu-ray format caused difficulties in manufacturing, especially the Blu-ray diode, leading to shortages at launch and the delay of the PAL region launches; however, by early December 2006, Sony announced that all production issues had been resolved.
Across PROs, there were six different formats of "difficulty" questions with five response categories (Table 3).
In addition, item formulations were adapted by a uniform introduction ("At the moment I'm able to accomplish the following activities without help…") and to fit the unified consistent five-point Likert scale response format (0 (without difficulties) – 1 (with little difficulties) – 2 (with some difficulties) – 3 (with big difficulties) – 4 (impossible)).
We evaluated each item in terms of problems with format, level of difficulty, redundancy, and floor and ceiling effects.
The self-reported difficulty format worked well in this large survey and gave a nuanced picture of the challenges the public perceive within the two dimensions.
Unfortunately the generalisability of these results is limited since the multiple-choice items were poorly standardised, both in format and in difficulty, and the circumstances under which the testing was conducted were essentially uncontrolled.
