Psychometric Tools is an open-source project commissioned by Measured Progress in partnership with William Stout to generate an open-source collection of tools that can be used for psychometric analyses.

The tools released through this project can be used to provide evidence to support claims made around the validity of an assessment program, and to support basic and applied psychometric research.

Why Open Source?

Traditionally testing companies develop their own proprietary software to conduct various psychometric analyses. This has led to non-standardized procedures and to our field of psychometrics being labeled a black box. By moving to an open-source platform we have three goals:

• To provide researchers and practitioners easy access to high quality open-source psychometric tools.
• To create an environment where researchers can collaborate on software, and this collaboration will lead to enhancements to the software and breakthroughs in research.
• By freely providing software and by establishing strategic partnership, we want to enable the psychometric community to participate in the establishment of standards regarding certain critical applications of psychometric tools.

We believe that focusing on the tools alone is insufficient. Ultimately, it is the development of standards concerning their usage and the interpretation of results coming out of the tools that is of greatest importance.