Analysis of Science Items of the Japanese National Center Test for University Admissions

Abstract

As the Korean College scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) has been implemented for 17 years since 1994, it is becoming more and more difficult to make new items that haven't been previously used to measure students' thinking ability. Therefore, it is necessary to keep conducting research on making new test items that can measure students' scholastic ability reliably. For this reason, multiple choice items on the Japanese university entrance exam, which is a Japanese National Center Test for University Admissions (NCTUA) equivalent of CSAT, were analyzed in order to draw implications for CSAT item development. In this study, we analyzed the Japanese NCTUA administered in January 2009 to investigate the structure of its science test. We also analyzed the NCTUA items by the domains of contents and behaviors, and tried to predict item difficulty from the perspective of Korean applicants. Major findings are as follows: Most NCTUA items measure understanding knowledge or low level thinking ability. Also the alloted time for each item is longer than CSAT. The number of test items, and the number of choice and alloted points for each item are diverse, unlike CSAT. The number of items using real-life materials are much more, but the items are not rigorous in sentence expression compared to CSAT. And the difference of difficulty level among science tests were larger with reference to CSAT. Also science score is required for most applicants regardless whether they are taking liberal arts or going onto the science track.