Test performance may have little or no personal consequences for examinees in numerous testing situations. In such situations, test administrators are likely to view the effort levels of examinees as a matter for concern. Response latency or item response time was used in an attempt to detect the occurrence of a type of guessing that is expected to occur if the examinee does not put forth adequate effort. That is, responding to an item without adequately reading it and engaging in solution-oriented behavior. The study employed response latency as an indicator of examinees rapid-guessing behavior based on response latencies lower than a particular threshold for each item. The identified responses were rescored differently using the Omitted, the Not-presented, or the Zero scoring procedures. The objective was to evaluate the use of different scoring procedures on Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) parameter estimates for dichotomously scored items that were obtained from a sample of 586 ninth grade students from five high schools in Jordan who took a computer-administration of a mathematics test. The results revealed that rapid guessing may have occurred fairly early in the test. Further, it was found that examinees showed rapid-guessing behavior on every item on the test and with greater frequency on the later items. A single group within-subjects design (repeated measure) ANOVA was used to assess changes in CTT and IRT item parameter estimates across scoring procedures.
Significant differences in classical item difficulty and discrimination indices for the Omitted and the Zero procedures contrasted with the default scoring procedure and there was no significant difference in difficulty and discrimination estimates between the Original scoring procedure and the Not-presented procedure. Further, there were no significant differences in IRT parameter estimates across scoring procedures except for persons’ parameter estimates. With regard to pass/fail decisions, it appears that identifying individual examinee rapid-guessing responses and rescoring them may well influence the scores and, therefore, the decision concerning performance may change accordingly.