Psychometric challenges in developing a college admission test for Jordan

In 1998, the Jordanian Council of Higher Education authorized the construction of a standardized

aptitude test that would be used to assist colleges and universities in admissions decisions. In this paper we report the results of a study in which it was examined whether test items were operating as desired and path analyses that explored predictors of student performance for a highly selective sample of Jordanian students. Item analyses indicated that 30% of the items showed inadequate discrimination or inappropriate difficulty levels, and an additional 19% of the items showed evidence of differential item functioning attributable to sex. The path analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of performance emerged for female students and included parental educational level and whether students attended a government-sponsored school or a private school. For males, the same predictive relationships were negligible.