Number of Items. Boeing and Buyer have mutually agreed on a list of specific equipment (the SPE Item) for which Buyer shall negotiate directly with the vendors to establish the price for each SPE Item. The SPE Item list includes seats, galleys, and interior furnishings. Buyer shall provide the price of the SPE Item when Buyer notifies Boeing of the SPE Item vendor.
Number of Items. Collection notice
Number of Items. The second part of the study attempted to understand whether poor inter-rater agreement could be ascribed to any one or two raters. The different professional experiences of the raters could have led to different perceptions of difficulty. Since the category “invalid question” was rarely used, its results are omitted from this analysis. For each rater, the number of items assigned to each level of difficulty was totalled for each of the four papers. The mean ±SD was then calculated for all four papers. Figure 4 shows the results. Figure 4 Mean ± SD number of items assigned to levels of difficulty 1–4 by each rater (n = 4 examination papers) Figure 4 shows that all four raters rated more items as level 1 (easy) than any other category. The second-highest level was 2 (moderately challeng- ing). Level 4 (very difficult) was rarely used by any of the raters. Rater UA rated more questions as difficult and very difficult than the other three raters. Rater TI rated more questions as easy or moderately challenging than all other raters. The small standard deviations indicate that there was little variation in each raters’ ratings among the four papers. A chi-squared test yielded a value of 15.61, which is not large enough to be significant (p = 0.16). Xxxxxx’x V measures the strength of association between two categorical variables, in this case, rater and use of levels of difficulty. Xxxxxx’x V confirmed the results of the chi-squared test and showed that the effect size was small (V = 0.154, p = 0.134). Table 2 summarizes the percentage of items assigned to levels 1 and 2, 3 and 4 and invalid items by each rater. Table 2 points to a possible source of unreliability. Since most of the items were rated 1 or 2 by all four raters, unreliability could result from disagreement in distinguishing easy from moderately challenging. This could be a flaw in the task, which had too many levels of difficulty. UA 6.6% 62.3% 31.2% TD 0% 80.4% 19.7% SA 4.9% 77.0% 18.0% This study provides empirical evidence that, despite intensive practice and discussion, a team of four expert raters achieved low inter-rater agreement in evaluating the level of difficulty of Life Sciences examination papers using a 5-level rating. This is in agreement with Xxxxxxx et al. (2012), who found that expert rating was the fourth most accurate of six methods to estimate item difficulty in examinations. Our findings also support the view of Xxxxx et al. (2000) that standard-setting is subjective and like...
