The purpose of this paper was to investigate the authenticity of IELTS academic tests. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task”. Authenticity is then an important aspect of testing since it describes the relationship between the test and the real world. Th...

Recent reports suggest that providers' implicit attitudes about race contribute to racial and ethnic health care disparities. However, little is known about physicians' implicit racial attitudes. This study measured implicit and explicit attitudes about race using the Race Attitude Implicit Association Test (IAT) for a large sample of test takers (N=404,277), including a sub-sample of medical d...

Response times on test items are easily collected in modern computerized testing. When collecting both (binary) responses and (continuous) response times on test items, it is possible to measure the accuracy and speed of test takers. To study the relationships between these two constructs, the model is extended with a multivariate multilevel regression structure which allows the incorporation o...

Overweight patients report weight discrimination in health care settings and subsequent avoidance of routine preventive health care. The purpose of this study was to examine implicit and explicit attitudes about weight among a large group of medical doctors (MDs) to determine the pervasiveness of negative attitudes about weight among MDs. Test-takers voluntarily accessed a public Web site, know...

Thousands of non-native speakers have been taking international tests English administered by long-established testing boards, such as ETC and PEARSON, for a wide range purposes worldwide. These test-takers represent various Englishes Outer Expanding Circle countries. However, there is little information to the degree which their are recognized represented in major English. Thus, this study exp...

This study examined the effects of aural and written prompts under two planning conditions (i.e. pre-task planning and no planning) on complexity, accuracy, and fluency of test takers' writing production. Forty learners in an English institute, who had already been classified as intermediate according to the Oxford Placement Test, were assigned to two planning conditions (i.e. no planning and p...

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the university admissions and proficiency testing landscape. One change been meteoric rise in use of fully automated Duolingo English Test (DET) for entrance purposes, offering test-takers a cheaper, shorter, accessible alternative. This rapid response study is first to investigate predictive value DET test scores relation students’ academic attainment, taking ...

This paper describes how a Many Faceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM) approach can be applied to performance assessment focusing on rater analysis. The article provides an introduction to MFRM, a description of MFRM analysis procedures, and an example to illustrate how to examine the effects of various sources of variability on test takers’ performance on a writing test by means of a MFRM analysis. ...

This paper provides evidence that scores on simple, low-stakes tests are associated with future economic success because the scores also reflect test-takers’ personality traits associated with their level of intrinsic motivation. To establish this, I use the coding speed test that was administered without incentives to participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). I show tha...