Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test taker ability. This study incorporated testlets (bundles of items) into two-stage and multistage designs, and compared the precision of the ability estimates derived from these designs with those derived from a standard computerized adaptive test (CAT) design and from paper-and-pencil test designs. Results with 50,000 and 25,000 simulated test takers indicate that all testlet-based designs resulted in improved precision over the same length paper-and-pencil test, and almost as much precision as the paper-and-pencil test of double length. Given the many other (nonpsychometric) advantages of these designs, they may be viable options for computer-administered tests. (SLD)