Balancing Test Accuracy and Security in Computerized Adaptive Testing

Abstract: Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is a form of personalized testing that accurately measures students' knowledge levels while reducing test length. Bilevel optimization-based CAT (BOBCAT) is a recent framework that learns a data-driven question selection algorithm to effectively reduce test length and improve test accuracy. However, it suffers from high question exposure and test overlap rates, which potentially affects test security. This paper introduces a constrained version of BOBCAT to address these problems by changing its optimization setup and enabling us to trade off test accuracy for question exposure and test overlap rates. We show that C-BOBCAT is effective through extensive experiments on two real-world adult testing datasets.