An application of techniques to shorten tests and increase validity

Used 2 methods of item selection against an external criterion to build 2 short tests for selecting programing and computer-maintenance students. The methods were (a) sequential accretion of items so that at each iteration the item selected was the one leading to the largest increase in the correlation between the test and the criterion, and (b) accretion of items in order of their declining item point biserial correlations with the criterion. The items were given to development and cross-validation samples consisting of 99 computer-maintenance and 315 programing students. There was no significant difference in the validity of tests built using either method. Both methods produced tests with cross-valid coefficients higher than the validity of the item pool and both were reasonably resistant to shrinkage.