Differential Item Functioning on the Graduate Management Admission Test

• Main Author: O'Neill, Kathleen A
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: 01.08.1993
• Subjects: Black Students; Classification; College Entrance Examinations; Difficulty Level; Graduate Management Admission Test; Higher Education; Item Bias; Mantel Haenszel Procedure; Mathematics Tests; Racial Differences; Sex Differences; Test Items; Verbal Tests; White Students

The purpose of this study was to identify differentially functioning items on operational administrations of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) through the use of the Mantel-Haenszel statistic. Retrospective analyses of data collected over 3 years are reported for black/white and female/male comparisons for the Verbal and Quantitative Tests. In general, one to six percent of the items were identified as being differentially difficult per comparison with a greater number of items flagged in the female/male analyses than in the black/white analyses. Although the analyses suggested some content characteristics that may be related to differential item functioning, these findings about GMAT items should be considered tentative since only a small number of items was studied, and all investigations were post hoc analyses. Correlations between item difficulty and differential item functioning were generally low, with the exception of quantitative items in the black/white analyses. For these items, a moderately positive relationship existed between item difficulty and the differential item functioning statistic, showing that black examinees performed differentially better than matched whites as item difficulty increased. Eleven tables in the text and four appendixes (one with six tables) provide information on item classification, means and standard deviations, and problem solving and sentence correction items. (Contains 43 references.) (Author/SLD)