**1. Introduction**

"Assessment is a central component of the teaching and learning" process. It is defined as "the systematic collection and analysis of information to improve student learning" [1]. Test (exam) is a part of student assessment and should be "An objective and standardized measure of a sample of behavior" [2]. Item analysis is a post-examination evaluation and can provide information about the quality of tests.

Item analysis is a statistical analysis of the student's responses on a test. Collection and summarization of students' responses can provide quantitative objective information that is useful in deciding the quality of the test items and increasing the assessment's efficiency [3, 4]. Also, Item analysis "investigates the performance of items considered individually either in relation to some external criterion or the remaining items on the test" [5].

### **2. Importance of psychometric analysis**

Any educational test should measure students' achievement in content material. Also, it leads to an overall assessment of students' development to decide their academic status [6, 7].

The importance of item analysis is determined by the objective of the assessment [8]. In summative assessment, the assessment results should be reliable and valid because incorrect decisions about the academic status will lead to negative

consequences [9]. While for the formative evaluation where the target is students learning, the item analysis has no much importance in giving feedback about items construction to test composers.

In literature, many reasons were reported for the conduction of item analysis, including examining if the item is functioning as intended, did it assess the required concepts (content)?, did it discriminate between those who master the content material and those who were not? was it within the acceptable level of difficulty?, whether the distracters are functioning or not? [10, 11].

#### **3. Factors affecting item analysis**

Many factors can affect item analysis and hence its interpretation [8]. Difficulty and discrimination indices were constantly changing per administration and influenced by the ability and number of the examinee, the number of items, and the quality of instructions [8, 12].

Whatever the exam or test blueprinting (item selection) method, exam items remain a sample of the needed content material. The number of items (item sampling) carries excellent importance because one cannot ask about all contents. With a too-small number of items, the results may not be enough to reflect true student ability [8]. Technical item flaws are divided into two major types, test wiseness, and irrelevant difficulty. Test wiseness flaws can result in more easy items. Faults related to irrelevant difficulty can result in more challenging items unrelated to the content under assessment. It was reported that item analysis of exam with 200 examinees is stable, and with fewer than 100 examinees should be interpreted with caution (item difficulty or item discrimination index). While Downing and Yudkowsky described that even for a small number of the examinee (e.g., 30) still, the item analysis can provide a piece of a helpful information to improve item [13, 14].

#### **4. Parameters of item analysis**

The item or psychometric analysis parameters include difficulty index, reliability, discrimination index, distractor efficiency [2]. The descriptive statistics of the exam are important and can provide helpful generalized information [2]. The descriptive statistics include scores frequency, the mean, the mode, the median, and the standard deviation.
