Breadcrumbs Item Authoring > About Item Lists > Analysing enemy items in the Item Lists screen

Analysing enemy items in the Item Lists screen

IMPORTANT: Only users with the Item Lists permission can analyse enemy items in Item Lists. For more information, read About roles and permissions.
NOTE: Enemy Relationship Analysis is not available by default and requires Surpass Copilot to be enabled on your Surpass instance. If you are interested in analysing enemy items in the Item Lists screen, contact your Surpass Customer Success Manager.

In Surpass, enemies are items that cannot appear in a test together. Surpass Copilot can analyse items in an item list to help you identify and create test form enemy relationships. For more information on enemy relationships, read Setting up enemy items.

In this article

This article explains how to analyse enemy items in the Item Lists screen.

1. Go to the Item Lists screen

To view an item list, go to Item Authoring > Item Lists.

Select the item list containing the items you want in the Item Lists screen.

2. Choose your items

Select the items for which you want to analyse possible enemy relationships.

Select the checkbox in the header row to open the Select All Options menu. You can select all items on the current page (Select all items on this page) or select all items across all pages (Select all items across all pages).

3. Analyse possible enemy relationships

Select Enemy Items.

The Enemy Relationship Analysis dialog lists all the possible pairs of enemy items from your selected items based on an analysis of their question stems and answer options. Items are listed using their unique identifier.

Existing enemy relationships are indicated by an Enemy Items icon.

Select a pair of items from the list of Possible Enemies to show the corresponding analysis.

In the analysis:

  • indicates the items do not have very similar Question Stems or Answer Options.
  • indicates the items have some similarities that should be considered and may suggest the items should be enemy items.
  • The same icons are used next to the Compromised? section to indicate whether one or both of the items are compromised.
TIP: Select an item’s unique identifier in the right-hand column to open it in Item Authoring in a new tab.

Expand the Overview, Question Stems, Answer Options, and Compromised? sections for more information.

Confirming test form enemy relationships

NOTE: You must have the relevant permissions for one or both items to create an enemy relationship between items. If you only have permission to edit one item in a pair, a principal relationship is created from that item. For more information, read 'About principal and acquired relationships' in Setting up enemy items.

After analysing a pair of possible enemies, you can create an enemy relationship between the two. To do this, select Confirm test form enemy relationship.

NOTE: Creating test form enemy relationships overrides any existing section enemy relationship between items.

Select Save Changes to create the enemy relationship.

Amending the minimum match percentage

You can adjust the match percentage that determines whether two items are similar enough to be considered possible enemies.

TIP: If there are too many possible enemies, select a higher value to return the most similar pairs of items and therefore the most likely to be compromised.

Further reading

Now you know how to analyse enemy items from Item Lists, read the following articles to learn more: