The large-scale assessment in the educational context aims at investigating the students’ abilities and competences to do college tests. One of the academic tests responsible for assessing the specific knowledge in different areas is the National Students Performance Exam – Enade given to students since 2004. This way, this article’s objective is to assess the psychometric properties of the 2005 Enade’s Pedagogy test via the Rasch model of the Item Response Theory. To do so, we used a database containing academic information of the 49.497 Pedagogy course students who took the Enade’s exam in 2005. The material used for the analysis consisted of the General Formation and the Specific Component Exams, both had objective and essay questions. The results of this study suggest items with good psychometric properties. The mean of the items difficulty indexes showed an overall median difficulty level. Regarding the students, most of them presented an abilities level that was comparable to the mean items difficulty (b=-0,14), indicating that both the exams difficulty levels and the students ability had a similar level. Reflecting on the importance of educational assessment, studies investigating the quality of higher education assessments are fundamental, taking into account the relevance of the subject when it comes to building up quality education and recognition within the social-political-economic scenario.
Large-scale assessment; Higher education; Psychology methods and measures
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