> I've never heard of adaptive tests before. How do they work? If you get the first few questions wrong, the test adapts to provide you successive questions that...what? Exploit what it perceives as a weak area for you? Or what?
>
> It seems kind of underhanded to me.
>

They use fewer questions than the paper tests. Roughly speaking, the first few are used to "pigeonhole" your score into ranges, and later questions fine tune your score within those ranges. So getting more early questions right results in harder questions later on. I don't think the questions target strong or weak areas - they're probably chosen at random from a set of questions with the desired level of difficulty.

Supposedly, by giving harder questions to better test takers, fewer questions are required to tell the very good from the somewhat good. Same goes for the bads. A very good test taker might get nearly all of the questions on a paper test right, so I guess it takes more questions of typical difficulty to induce a few of them into making a few errors so you can differentiate between them.

Personally, I've never trusted adaptive tests. It feels like too much can turn on one or two early questions that you happen to find unusually easy or hard.

^v^:)^v^
FB