The Challenges Involved in Creating Online Tests
Dr. Robert Courchêne
At the University of Ottawa, where Robert Courchêne heads up the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute, all students must declare either French or English as their major language. The other automatically becomes their second language of study. The institute has devised a 70-minute online, computer-scored placement test of receptive skills that automatically assigns students to one of four levels of language courses as their starting point. The main difficulty is students who deliberately do worse on the test than they are capable of, in an attempt to slide by in an easy course, so adjustments are made in about ten percent of the assignments.

• For students who have been educated in an immersion program, there is a competency test to assess productive skills as well. Again it is machine-administered, but the recorded speaking and writing samples are assessed by two raters. The department continues to refine this part of the exam. Although computer-based tests are cheaper and faster to administer, poorer students are not as well discriminated by such tests.
• The university is currently beginning a longitudinal study, in which they will administer exit tests as well, to measure achievement. In addition, to discriminate better among students at the borderline between high placement students and low competency students, they want to devise a tailored test, where students can take a ten-minute test and then be routed to either the placement or competency test, so they are trying to find shorter but equally effective writing and speaking tasks. They have tried letters and second paragraphs of the traditional five-paragraph essay, and are now looking at using the same theme for both the reading and writing questions in order to streamline the test while increasing its effectiveness. They are also introducing a very short grammar section with high discrimination.
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