background: considering the importance of entering doctoral students to universities with hard competition, in order to detect the predictive power of entrance exam grade in educational achievement in early years, we attempted to investigate the efficacy of entrance exam with basic scientific test. methods: the existing data from national organization for education testing and education center ...

the newly administered iranian ph.d. program entrance exam (ppee) is supposed to have had different washback effects on university curriculums. this qualitative study examined the effects of the new tefl ppee on the applicants’ study plans and strategies from the points of view of both iranian university instructors and applicants. to this end, we conducted in-depth interviews with 10 experienc...

Abstract The present paper appraises a standardized test, the entrance exam of Iranian universities, known as “Konkur” that is administered annually means gaining admission to higher education in Iran. This norm-referenced test for students majoring mathematics, experimental sciences, and humanities whose scores along their weighted GPAs last 3 years high school are used indicators students’ ra...

Background: Considering the importance of entering doctoral students to universities with hard competition, in order to detect the predictive power of entrance exam grade in educational achievement in early years, we attempted to investigate the efficacy of entrance exam with basic scientific test. Methods: The existing data from national organization for education testing and education center ...

The newly administered Iranian Ph.D. Program Entrance Exam (PPEE) is supposed to have had different washback effects on university curriculums. This qualitative study examined the effects of the new TEFL PPEE on the applicants’ study plans and strategies from the points of view of both Iranian university instructors and applicants. To this end, we conducted in-depth interviews with 10 experienc...

This study aimed at examining the issues affecting the use of IRT models in investigating differential item functioning in high stakes testing. It specifically focused on the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE) Special English Subtest. A sample of 200,000 participants was randomly selected from the candidates taking part in the INUEE 2003 and 2004 respectively. The data collected ...

This paper describes an overview of the first QA Lab (Question Answering Lab for Entrance Exam) task at NTCIR 11. The goal of the QA lab is to provide a module-based platform for advanced question answering systems and comparative evaluation for solving real-world university entrance exam questions. In this task, “world history” questions are selected from The National Center Test for Universit...

Washback refers to the effect of testing on teaching and learning. The university entrance exam for Iranian MA candidates of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (hereinafter TEFL MA UEE) is a nationwide high-stakes test administered every year, and significant decisions will be made based on the examinees’ performance on this exam; therefore, it is prone to bring about degrees of washback at...