Your student took a placement test. The result was B2. You believe he is B1. What went wrong?
‘Your test isn’t accurate!’ — A test designer responds
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Placement testing
Getting test takers started with the Dynamic Placement Test
Subramoni Iyer describes how his experience with students and teachers in Syria led to localised test instructions and a pre-test video.
Cultural fairness in a placement test?
In this video, Andrew Stokes discusses how we can ensure that a placement test — or any other kind of language test — is culturally fair.
“I didn’t have time to finish the test — and I’m an English teacher!”
Surely the more questions you answer in a placement test, the more points you get and the higher your score? If you can’t finish, you can’t do yourself justice. And that must invalidate the result.
Should we test all four skills in a placement test?
In the second of a series of short videos, testing expert Laura Edwards looks at the the roles of output and input in language testing.
What is a placement test?
Should a placement test include speaking and writing? Is it important that it is adaptive? Does a test-taker have to attempt every question? What, in fact is a placement test?
Setting up a level test: challenges and solutions
When Clarity and telc first conceptualised the Dynamic Placement Test, a key objective was to devise a democratic test — a computer-based level test available to schools whatever their digital setup. At the same time, we didn’t want to compromise on the technology: it needed to be a test that went well beyond multiple choice questions and gap fills. So within these constraints, the team prioritised three areas.
Cheating and the Dynamic Placement Test
Can a test run on a student’s device ever be secure? What’s to stop a test taker looking up the answers on the Internet? What, in fact, does ‘secure’ mean in the context of a placement test?
‘I’m sorry to say at the moment people don’t take tests for fun.’
Sean McDonald of telc catches up with Adrian Raper at the IATEFL Conference in Glasgow. He discusses his philosophy of testing, and the steady move from paper-based exams towards digital language assessment.
Development of an online test: Three challenges
'We like your online placement test,' said the teacher at Taiwan’s Asia University, 'but with 1,000 freshers and only 20 computers, we’d be halfway through the first semester before we could even sort out our classes.' Placement tests are a chore. In most schools they...