Prior research has indicated that items administered to college students for rating their instructors, can be empirically as well as logically classified on a continuum from very general to specific. Three of these hypothesized classifications of item specificity--global, general concept, and specific--were chosen to represent this continuum. Thirty-nine Likert-type items empirically identified as members of these categories, and as members of a content domain labeled influence and security, were then compared against six statistical properties: (1) skewness in distribution of class section means; (2) between-class variance of means; (3) within-class variance among student responses; (4) ceiling effect; (5) item reliability; and (6) interquartile range. Results indicated that most items met the criteria hypothesized, although some discrepancies for the most specific items were pronounced. The differentiation among specificity levels offered an essentially content-free classification scheme. Implications were drawn for questionnaire item writing, use of results, and the evaluation of overall item quality. (Author/CP)