Analysis of a test

1.    What is the purpose of the test?

a.    The purpose of this test is to know the English level of the students.

2.    Does it represent direct or indirect testing (or a mixture of both)?

a.    They represent both direct and indirect testing, direct because it provides the information about the students’ abilities that we want to assess and it also has authentic conversations in the listening area. Indirect because it has a section where the student selects the appropriate answers that are underlined and we want to measure and that are used in informal and formal Standard English.

3.    Are the items discrete point or integrative (or mixture of both)?

a.    Most of them are discrete because it measures one element at a time. It also has some small part of integrative.

4.    Which items are objectives, and which are subjective? Can you order the subjective items according to degree of subjectivity?

a.    It is objective because has multiple choice.

5.    Is the text norm-referenced or criterion-referenced?

a.    Norm-reference

6.    Does the test measure communicative abilities? Would you describe it as a communicative test? Justify your answer

a.    Yes, because in the first part there are 9 conversations that you heard and read in order to answer the questions. And it also has a reading part where students have to read and answer question, and a part that is called the Language use section where students answer a 34 multiple choice questions choosing the correct one according to their own experiences in every day’s language

7.    What relationship is there between the answers to question 6 and the answers to the other questions?

a.    In all the other questions, as well in the number six, what they tried to show us is a manner to measure the ability that a student has to communicate in his/her second language; probably some test are better for some institutions or the tests were created for a specific purpose, but basically the main objective of everything was to test the communicative ability of the individuals.