Welcome

Lertap, the Laboratory of Educational Research Test Analysis Package, is a system for item, test, and survey analysis, now well into its fifth version.

This site supports Lertap users by providing access to a variety of resources. You'll find introductory material, meant to show off what Lertap can do; sample data sets for use with classes; lots of documentation; and access to software for downloading.

Can't find what you want on this site? Just send us an email message, and let us know what you're looking for (puedes escribirnos en español, si quieres).

Videos

The quickest way to see what Lertap does might be to take in one of our videos. They're not Hollywood or Bollywood quality (far from it) (far far from it), but they do exemplify what Lertap looks like when it runs. Go for this eye candy by doing you-know-what here.

Recent System Developments

The Excel 2007 version for Windows is now available as a commercial product on the Assessment Systems website.

This new version has the same functionality as the Excel 2003 version of Lertap for Windows. But note: there may not be a particularly good reason to think of switching to Excel 2007 just for the sake of Lertap. In fact, there remain some reasonably reasonable reasons to remain with Excel 2003 (click here).

Lertap is now equipped to provide handy support for users of ITEMAN, XCALIBRE, and RASCAL. Read more here.

Excel 2008 has been released for the Macintosh line. Unfortunately Microsoft has dropped support for Visual Basic for Applications in this version of Excel, meaning that it will not run Lertap. It seems that VBA is gone from the entire Macintosh Office 2008 suite, unlikely to reappear. Macintosh Lertap users will have to stick with Excel 2004, or with Excel X. Or, they'll start running Windows on their Macs -- maybe that's what Microsoft intended?

Popular Documentation Links

Of course, every resource on our website is popular -- you'd expect no less, no doubt.

However there are two documents which continue to draw the largest crowds, and by far.

One is a paper on "visual item analysis", suggesting supplementing tables of item statistics with eye-catching visuals called "quintile plots" -- click here to link to it, a pdf document about 400 KB in size.

The other is a nearly-exact copy of a 2007 journal article regarding the use of cut scores, as in licensing and certification testing. It's a pdf document, available by clicking here. (This document is fairly technical in nature.)