The technology of IRT is used as one way to compute the kinds of "scoring tables" that one sees converting number-correct scores to "scale scores" for large-scale tests such as the SAT. Such tables are used to "adjust" the scores on each form for the fact that one form may be slightly easier or more difficult than another. We make them regularly in our shop to provide the summed-score to scaled-score conversion tables for North Carolina's "EOG" and "EOC" tests (not to mention the North Carolina Test of Computer Skills---you don't want to know!). Other folks need to do this, but for that to happen we need to provide them with easier-to-use software than the command-line "console" versions we use; our user community (aside from our enslaved graduate students) demands GUI interfaces and bells and whistles or they won't use the software. So, in order to make our test theory available to a wider audience, we must provide (free ;) software (which we aren't capable of making ourselves).

Possible goal:

Design and build an application that reads "item parameter" files and creates summed-score to scale-score translation tables. We have several versions of such an application in the 'console' mode provided for Windows and the Mac OS by the Metrowerks development system, but to be useful to the kinds of less-technically-inclined consumers for which it's needed, we need a version with a GUI, and printing and copy-and-paste and all of the other niceties modern folk expect of computer software. Target could be either Windows or the Mac OS; the Windows implementation is farthest from our grasp, but would be most useful because of the ubiquity of those machines. Our current console versions are C++, so a version in that language could use some of our code; but if Java would make the entire project easier something could be worked out.