Item weighting in tests

If you increase the weight of an item, the test-taker is awarded more marks for it in the final test result. Weights are defined at the level of the item, when you are authoring your test. They are applied, however, at the level of the test.

When a test containing weighted items has been scored, the individual item scores (i.e. the value of 'SCORE' listed for each item: for the first item ('Basic arithmetic') in the image below, this is '1') will not reflect the weight, as weights are only taken into consideration at test level. Instead, the weights will show in the list of test variables, as shown in the image.

Scores from a weighted test

As you can see, the value of SCORE_TOTAL_MAX is 3, as there were three items. The value of SCORE_TOTAL_MAX_WEIGHTED is 6, however (the three items had weights of 1, 2 and 3 respectively, making a total of 6).

The test-taker answered the first two questions correctly, but the third incorrectly. In the SCORE_RATIO, you can see that he/she got two out of three questions right, and therefore scores 2/3 on a simple tally. However, when the item weights are taken into consideration - as shown in SCORE_RATIO_WEIGHTED - you will see that the test-taker got 50%. This is because he/she scored 3 marks on the first two items (worth 1 and 2 marks respectively), and none on the last item (which was worth 3 marks).