| Summary: | Introduction: While student's perception of an exam is a reflection of their feelings toward the exmination items, item analysis is a statistical analysis of their responses to examination items. The study aims to compare students' perception toward the difficulty of an examination with the results of item analysis and examination reliability and validity.
Materials and methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted in the College of Medicine between January and April 2019. The study uses a structured questionnaire and standardized item analysis of students' examination.
Results: Overall, 80 items were analyzed in this study. Kuder–Richardson Formula 20 of the examination was 0.906. The average difficulty index of the examination items was 69.4 (
±
21.86). The response rate of the questionnaire was 88.9% (40/45). Students considered the examination as easy (70.4%).
Students' perception toward the difficulty of the individual items shows a moderate positive correlation between easy perception and difficulty index (r = 0.7033, p = 0.00001), which means there is a tendency for high difficulty index to go with high easy perception (and vice versa). Moderate negative correlations were reported between moderate (r = –0.2969, p = 0.008082) and difficult (r = –0.6094, p = 0.00001) perception to individual items' difficulty and difficulty index.
A significant moderate positive correlation (r = 0.615, p = 0.00001) was reported between the difficulty index and items covered within the specific learning outcomes.
Conclusion: Students’ perception toward items difficulty is aligned with the standard
difficulty index of items. Their perception can support the evidence of examination validity.
The constructions of items from the covered outcomes result in an acceptable level of
item and examination difficulties.
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