Detection of Item Preknowledge Using Response Times

Benefiting from item preknowledge is a major type of fraudulent behavior during educational assessments. This article suggests a new statistic that can be used for detecting the examinees who may have benefited from item preknowledge using their response times. The statistic quantifies the difference in speed between the compromised items and the non-compromised items of the examinees. The distribution of the statistic under the null hypothesis of no preknowledge is proved to be the standard normal distribution. A simulation study is used to evaluate the Type I error rate and power of the suggested statistic. A real data example demonstrates the usefulness of the new statistic that is found to provide information that is not provided by statistics based only on item scores.