Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions

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Item difficulty index, discrimination index, and reliability of the 26 health professions licensing examinations in 2024, Korea: a psychometric study: Yoon Hee Kim, Bo Hyun Kim, Joonki Kim, Bokyoung Jung, Sangyoung Bae; J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2025;22:38. Published online December 15, 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2025.22.38

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Item difficulty index, discrimination index, and reliability of the 26 health professions licensing examinations in 2023, Korea: a psychometric study: Yoon Hee Kim, Bo Hyun Kim, Joonki Kim, Bokyoung Jung, Sangyoung Bae; J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2024;21:40. Published online December 11, 2024; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2024.21.40

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Technical report

Item difficulty index, discrimination index, and reliability of the 26 health professions licensing examinations in 2022, Korea: a psychometric study: Yoon Hee Kim, Bo Hyun Kim, Joonki Kim, Bokyoung Jung, Sangyoung Bae; J Educ Eval Health Prof. 2023;20:31. Published online November 22, 2023; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3352/jeehp.2023.20.31

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Abstract PDF Supplementary Material

Purpose
This study presents item analysis results of the 26 health personnel licensing examinations managed by the Korea Health Personnel Licensing Examination Institute (KHPLEI) in 2022.
Methods
The item difficulty index, item discrimination index, and reliability were calculated. The item discrimination index was calculated using a discrimination index based on the upper and lower 27% rule and the item-total correlation.
Results
Out of 468,352 total examinees, 418,887 (89.4%) passed. The pass rates ranged from 27.3% for health educators level 1 to 97.1% for oriental medical doctors. Most examinations had a high average difficulty index, albeit to varying degrees, ranging from 61.3% for prosthetists and orthotists to 83.9% for care workers. The average discrimination index based on the upper and lower 27% rule ranged from 0.17 for oriental medical doctors to 0.38 for radiological technologists. The average item-total correlation ranged from 0.20 for oriental medical doctors to 0.38 for radiological technologists. The Cronbach α, as a measure of reliability, ranged from 0.872 for health educators-level 3 to 0.978 for medical technologists. The correlation coefficient between the average difficulty index and average discrimination index was -0.2452 (P=0.1557), that between the average difficulty index and the average item-total correlation was 0.3502 (P=0.0392), and that between the average discrimination index and the average item-total correlation was 0.7944 (P<0.0001).
Conclusion
This technical report presents the item analysis results and reliability of the recent examinations by the KHPLEI, demonstrating an acceptable range of difficulty index and discrimination index values, as well as good reliability.

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