The Kerala Public Service Commission constituted a committee to standardize the marks obtained by the candidates in the 10th level common preliminary examinations conducted in multi-phases with different question papers based on the same syllabus. The committee had the opinion that this standardization is needed because there is a significant contrast in difficulty levels between the question papers provided.
Nobody can determine whether this particular question is difficult simply by reading the question and also its not fair to take a decision that which question is more difficult and which one is not only on the basis of a persons subjectivity. This can only be decided through an empirical evaluation. This article gives you the major information on the standardization of the marks.
How To Evaluate the Level of Difficulty in Questions
The above mentioned committee decided to evaluate the level of difficulty of the questions in each question paper.The index of difficulty (p) of a question is defined as the proportion of
correct answers of that question (that is the number of correct answers of the question divided by the total number of candidates who wrote the examination with the respective question paper)( Nitko (1996), Crocker & Algina, 1986). If the proportion of the answers to the questions is high then the question will be easy and wise versa. The index of difficulty will be between 0 and 1.The index of difficulty ‘0’ means the maximum is the difficulty and ‘1’means the difficulty is minimum.
The committee analyzed thoroughly and stated that the marks scored by the candidates in various phases of exam is good whether the questions are of difficult ones and there are also top-scorers in each phase too. This may be due to the fact that the candidate appeared for these exams will be having good educational qualifications and it should be noted that there is no difference in the capabilities of the candidates.
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The questions in each question papers are to be divided into five strata as follows:
STRATUM NO: |
Range of Difficulty Index(P) |
Difficulty Level |
|
| 1 | 0≤ p <0.2 | Very Difficult | |
| 2 | 0.2≤ p <0.4 | Difficult | |
| 3 | 0.4≤ p <0.6 | Average | |
| 4 | 0.6≤ p <0.8 | Easy | |
| 5 | 0.8≤ p ≤1 | Very Easy | |
If the placement of difficulty levels in different question papers varies differently, then we can conclude that all question papers are not in the same level. Under this situation we have to endorse some other methods to standardize the marks. The committee ended up with the mind that no procedure can be absolutely correct in this case because one candidates difficulty is not same for the other candidate, this can be considered by evaluating the performance of the candidate in the exam. The benefit of standardization is given in proportion to the performance of the candidates in the respective question paper after equated the difficulty score of that question paper to the difficulty score of the question paper which is observed as minimum difficult by the above said procedure. Thus, if a candidate scored a mark zero or below zero, no benefit of standardization will be obtained.
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Procedure For Standardization of Marks Obtained
The committee unanimously suggests the following procedure for standardization:
All questions in a question paper are to be stratified into five levels as given above. Then a score of difficulty ( DS) is to be computed for each question paper as given below.
Compute DSi = Σ[Nij× (1-Mi )] / Ni
Where DSi is the Score of difficulty for the ith question paper; Nij is the number of questions in the jth stratum of the ith question paper. Mj is the median difficulty score of the jth stratum (M1=0.1, M2=0.3, M3=0.5, M4=0.7, M5=0.9), Ni is the number of questions in the ith question paper.
Then the proportion of difficulty (Multiplier, Ki) of each question paper to the lowest difficult question paper ( DSi is minimum) can be computed as:
Ki = (DSi/ Dsmin)
DSmin is the score of difficulty of the question paper which has the minimum DS. Then the final mark of the jth candidate who attended the ith question paper ( Sij) is to be computed as:
Sij = Minimum(Mij ×Ki, 100)
Where Mij is the mark actually scored out of 100 (including negative marks) by the jth candidate in the ith group.
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we hope that the above mentioned article gives you some knowledge on the standardization of the 10th level psc preliminary exams 2021. Do prepare for the Mains without wasting time revise through all the portions.
Good Luck ALL !!!!!!!!!
