About JMetrik
The author and copyright holder of ItemAnalysis.com, jMetrik.com, and jMetrik is J. Patrick Meyer, an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. The website and software is provided "as is" in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
The origins of this website and the item analysis software date back to 2002, when I created a free online item analysis tool for www.SurveyReaction.com. That tool was useful for small data sets, but it was limited by server-side processing constraints and VBScript. To overcome these limitations, I created ItemQual, a free Java application for item and DIF analysis, in 2005. ItemQual was exceptionally fast, which countered the bias that Java is a slow programming language. It was also relatively popular as evidenced by several hundred users from over twenty countries. However, ItemQual was my first attempt at object oriented programming and it was not very object oriented. The source code resembled a scripting language. As a result, it was very difficult to modify the code and incorporate new features. Therefore, I began to create a new software package in 2006. It took me a couple of years to learn how to really use the features of the Java programming language to create a powerful and scalable object oriented program. I created the new software package from scratch. It shares no code with ItemQual. I changed the name from ItemQual to jMetrik to reflect the expanded scope of the software and the move to an open source software distribution.
jMetrik versions have three numbers separated by a period such as 1.0.6 (read as major.minor.variant). The first number indicates the major release version. The second number is the minor release version and the third number is indicates a small variation. Major releases involve structural changes to the program, numerous new features, and improvements to existing features. Minor releases include some new features, small changes to existing features, or important bug fixes. Small vaqriations involve small bug fixes. Release dates for all versions of jMetrik are listed below.
| Version | Release Date |
| 1.0.0 | September 20, 2009 |
| 1.0.1 | November 8, 2009 |
| 1.0.2 | November 9, 2009 |
| 1.0.3 | November 10, 2009 |
| 1.0.4 | February 14, 2010 |
| 1.0.5 | April 29, 2010 |
| 1.0.6 | April 30, 2010 |
| 2.0.0 | April 6, 2011 |
| 2.0.1 | April 23, 2010 |
| 2.1.0 | August 7, 2011 |
If you have any questions about jMetrik, please send an email to support@itemanalysis.com.