Is Effort Moderated Scoring Robust to Multidimensional Rapid Guessing?

To mitigate the potential damaging consequences of rapid guessing (RG), a form of noneffortful responding, researchers have proposed a number of scoring approaches. The present simulation study examines the robustness of the most popular of these approaches, the unidimensional effort-moderated (EM) scoring procedure, to multidimensional RG (i.e., RG that is linearly related to examinee ability). Specifically, EM scoring is compared with the Holman–Glas (HG) method, a multidimensional scoring approach, in terms of model fit distortion, ability parameter recovery, and omega reliability distortion. Test difficulty, the proportion of RG present within a sample, and the strength of association between ability and RG propensity were manipulated to create 80 total conditions. Overall, the results showed that EM scoring provided improved model fit compared with HG scoring when RG comprised 12% or less of all item responses. Furthermore, no significant differences in ability parameter recovery and omega reliability distortion were noted when comparing these two scoring approaches under moderate degrees of RG multidimensionality. These limited differences were largely due to the limited impact of RG on aggregated ability (bias ranged from 0.00 to 0.05 logits) and reliability (distortion was ≤ .005 units) estimates when as much as 40% of item responses in the sample data reflected RG behavior.