Item Response Theory: how smart ARE you?

Linear Digressions

• Episode: Item Response Theory: how smart ARE you?
• Website: Linear Digressions
• Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/udacity-linear-digressions?format=xml
• Duration: 00:11:46
• Published: 2016-02-08 04:37

Psychometrics is all about measuring the psychological characteristics of people; for example, scholastic aptitude. How is this done? Tests, of course! But there's a chicken-and-egg problem here: you need to know both how hard a test is, and how smart the test-taker is, in order to get the results you want. How to solve this problem, one equation with two unknowns? Item response theory--the data science behind such tests and the GRE. Relevant links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory