Wilcox (1976) has recently recommended the use of binomial tables to determine the minimum number of items (n) and the minimum passing score (xc) for a mastery test, which would yield acceptable risks of misclassifying an examinee. Fhaner (1974) described another method of estimating n and xc, which is based on normal approximation to binomial distributions. The present paper describes a method of estimating n and xc when n is too large to use Wilcox's binomial-table-scanning method, and when the parameters Π1 and Π2 of the relevant binomial distributions, are either too small or too large to justify the use of Fhaner's normal approximation method.
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