Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Teaching and testing
- 2 Testing as problem solving: an overview of the book
- 3 Kinds of tests and testing
- 4 Validity
- 5 Reliability
- 6 Achieving beneficial backwash
- 7 Stages of test development
- 8 Common test techniques
- 9 Testing writing
- 10 Testing oral ability
- 11 Testing reading
- 12 Testing listening
- 13 Testing grammar and vocabulary
- 14 Testing overall ability
- 15 Tests for young learners
- 16 Test administration
- Appendix 1 The statistical analysis of test data
- Appendix 2 Item banking
- Appendix 3 Questions on the New Zealand youth hostels passage
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Author Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Teaching and testing
- 2 Testing as problem solving: an overview of the book
- 3 Kinds of tests and testing
- 4 Validity
- 5 Reliability
- 6 Achieving beneficial backwash
- 7 Stages of test development
- 8 Common test techniques
- 9 Testing writing
- 10 Testing oral ability
- 11 Testing reading
- 12 Testing listening
- 13 Testing grammar and vocabulary
- 14 Testing overall ability
- 15 Tests for young learners
- 16 Test administration
- Appendix 1 The statistical analysis of test data
- Appendix 2 Item banking
- Appendix 3 Questions on the New Zealand youth hostels passage
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Author Index
Summary
Imagine that a hundred students take a 100-item test at three o'clock one Thursday afternoon. The test is not impossibly difficult or ridiculously easy for these students, so they do not all get zero or a perfect score of 100. Now what if, in fact, they had not taken the test on the Thursday but had taken it at three o'clock the previous afternoon? Would we expect each student to have got exactly the same score on the Wednesday as they actually did on the Thursday? The answer to this question must be no. Even if we assume that the test is excellent, that the conditions of administration are almost identical, that the scoring calls for no judgement on the part of the scorers and is carried out with perfect care, and that no learning or forgetting has taken place during the one-day interval, nevertheless we would not expect every individual to get precisely the same score on the Wednesday as they got on the Thursday. Human beings are not like that; they simply do not behave in exactly the same way on every occasion, even when the circumstances seem identical.
But if this is the case, it implies that we can never have complete trust in any set of test scores. We know that the scores would have been different if the test had been administered on the previous or the following day. This is inevitable, and we must accept it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Testing for Language Teachers , pp. 36 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002