“…The progress that has been made over the past decade is reflected in the methodologies of amplified objectives, fox test specifications, mapping sentences (facet theory), item transformations, item forms, and algorithms (See MiUman, 1980;Popham, 1980;Roid & Haladyna, 1980). Proponents of the latter three strategies, in particular, claim that generating an item domain is an objective, mechanical process (Berk, 1979(Berk, , 1980a. While the precision of the different strategies varies markedly and much more research lies ahead, the strategies do provide some evidence to refute the skepticism expressed by Thorndike in 1967, "As soon as we try to conceptualize a test score as a sample from some universe, we are brought face to face with the very knotty problem of defining the universe from which we are sampling (p. 285)... the universe is considerably restricted, is hard to define, and the sampling from it is hardly to be considered random" (p. 288).…”