The development of conceptual frameworks for fairness in language testing has significantly expanded the scope of discussions on fairness. Empirical research motivated by these theories, however, has been minimal. There is no research, for example, that thoroughly examines the perceptions of test takers concerning fairness as outlined in the frameworks. Taking the context of the admissions officer system of universities in Korea, this paper looks at how the information released by universities before their exams affect students’ perceptions of test fairness. Furthermore, the paper attempts to examine the washback of such perceptions as test-takers prepare for the test. Two Korean universities that conducted written tasks for its early admissions processes were selected. Participants were six actual test-takers, who were extensively surveyed and interviewed. The results show that students placed much more faith in the assessment when the information regarding the test construct was relayed in a clear and consistent manner. Such results suggest that test developers need to pay acute attention to the information they provide to test-takers prior to the test, and that test-takers should be aware of the rights that they have regarding the disclosure of test information.

The present study aims to explore the factors affecting Korean EFL high school students’ choice of picture options with key expressions in a writing test prompt, as well as the effects of option position and contents on their performance. It further aims to examine whether these effects vary with English writing proficiency. The performance of lower- and higher-level students in two prompts was analyzed along with their reasons for their choices. The prompt had three picture options with two key expressions in each option; the students chose one picture option and wrote a 20-word message declining a request using a reason specified in the option. Significant effects were not found for position within the prompts, but for the content of the options. The participants tended to choose a certain picture option over others mainly because of topical knowledge, difficulty level, or picture preference. The findings suggest a significant effect of picture contents, which yields implications for designing prompts with picture options for score validity.

This study investigates secondary school English teachers’ perceptions and psychological burdens involved in the implementation of the speaking and writing tests of the National English Ability Test, which is being developed by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. The study surveyed 138 secondary school English teachers in Seoul. Although more than half of the teachers were aware of the new test, 18% of the surveyed teachers were not aware of the fact that speaking and writing skills would be assessed in the new test. Also, 22.7% of the teachers were opposed to the productive skills test. More than half (56.2%) of the teachers felt some psychological burdens toward the inclusion of the speaking/writing tests. Although the teachers admitted that serving as raters for the new test would help improve their teaching, the majority of them were reluctant to participate in the actual rating process. The teachers felt that the difficulty of subjective rating and the lack of time for the speaking and writing tests were serious problems in implementing the new test. The teachers were sensitive toward the students’ test anxiety. They also indicated that they feel a strong psychological burden when making judgments on the students' performances. Implications and suggestions are made based on the findings.

Because performance assessment such as a composition test introduces a range of factors that may influence the chances of success for a candidate on the test, those in charge of monitoring quality control for performance assessment programs need to gather information that will help them determine whether all aspects of the programs are working as intended. In the present study, generalizability theory (Brennan, 1992) was employed to examine the relative effects of various sources of variability on students" performance on an essay writing test and also to investigate the reliability of the assigned scores. The results showed that due to the largest effect associated with the students" writing ability and negligible effects associated with facets of measurement such as scoring criteria and ratings, the generalizability coefficient estimated for the writing test was high, suggesting that the test is a reliable measure of what it purports to measure, the students" writing ability.

A field-specific essay test was developed as an attempt to improve the ESL placement procedure for international graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Graduate departments were classified into four areas, business, humanities/social sciences, technology and life sciences, and a set of four input prompts, and writing questions was developed. A total of 124 volunteers participated in taking both the regularly-required general-topic test and the field-specific test. A total-group FACETS analysis of the students’ performance on the two tests showed that they performed better on the field-specific test. However, subgroup analyses showed the field-specific topic effect only in the business and life sciences subgroups, while no prompt effect was found for the humanities/social sciences and technology subgroups. Considering that early in the test development procedure, these results were predicted by in a prompt evaluation session, the results suggest that more effort should be exerted to carefully select the topic and content of prompts in order to secure equivalency of the topic effect across all disciplinary groups. This paper further addresses limitations and promising research directions.

Objective: To test appropriateness of writing subtest translated into Korean. Method: Fourty-five students participated in this study. The time spent on each sentence was measured for both hand. We performed Repeated Measure as a statistical analysis. Results: When the averaged time spent on each sentence was compared, the second and the fourth sentences were longer than the first and the third sentences. There were significant differences in the time spent to write each sentences with nondominant hand, but not with dominant hand. For the nondominant hand, the result of contrast test had significant differences in the first, second, third sentences, but not in the fourth sentence. Conclusions: There was significant difference in the time spent in writing the four sentences. Because equivalent time duration represents the validity of Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test, a modification of the test is recommended.