ABSTRACT
The idea of computerized item banking is at least 30 years old (e.g., Choppin, 1976). It has been almost that long since I first programmed a computerized item banker. Thirty years ago, computerized item banking concepts were simple. The source material consisted of either a collection of old tests or those same tests cut apart, item by item, pasted on cards, and somehow organized in one or more shoeboxes. The vast majority of the items were of the textual multiple-choice variety. Virtually any form of computerization was an improvement, usually resulting in reduced clerical time for producing future tests. Of course, the computer systems were simple as well. My first item banker was housed on a mainframe, accessed through a CRT at 30 characters per second, and budgeted for two megabytes of disk storage. Baker (1986), by comparison, noted that the storage problem had become a thing of the past with as much as 30 megabytes then available on a microcomputer. As further comparison, today’s commodity home computers routinely offer at least 60 gigabytes-about 2,000 times what Baker referenced.
