This study investigated the impact of 26 EFL college students’ familiarity levels with the visual information of TOEIC listening test items on test scores and test performance procedure. Data collected measured students’ degree of familiarity with the visuals via a pre-test and their listening test scores, and responses to the post-test questionnaire were analyzed. To analyze the data, one-way ANOVA was conducted to locate the interdependency between the students’ familiarity levels with visuals and their test scores. Results found that there was no statistically significant differences in test scores regardless of the students’ levels of familiarity with the visuals. Additionally, the correlations between the familiarity with the visuals and the students’ test scores were low. However, the students experienced difficulties with unfamiliar visuals while taking the test. These findings indicate that, although test-takers’ familiarity with visuals does not predict their listening test scores, there is a need to tailor the visuals when developing listening test-items.

This study examines the effects of text length and question type on Korean EFL readers’ reading comprehension of the fill-in-the-blank items in Korean CSAT. A total of 100 Korean EFL college students participated in the study. After divided into three different proficiency groups, the participants took a reading comprehension test which consisted of 4 reading passages (2 short and 2 long) from the Korean CSAT, followed by multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank questions and open-ended inference questions. The longer version of the passages was made from its originally restored version in which one or two paragraphs were added. The results showed that the college students performed better on the long passages than the short ones. In addition, the college students’ reading comprehension test performance was affected differently depending on the type of questions. The findings of the study provided implications on how to select and construct reading passages for high-stake nationwide examinations, such as the Korean CSAT.