For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

Graduate admission has become a critical process in tertiary education, whereby selecting valid admissions instruments is key. This study assessed the validity of Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Test scores for admission to Master's programmes at a technical university in Europe. We investigated the indicative value of GRE scores for the…

This study examines the predictive validity of the TOEFL iBT with respect to academic achievement as measured by the first-year grade point average (GPA) of Chinese students at Purdue University, a large, public, Research I institution in Indiana, USA. Correlations between GPA, TOEFL iBT total and subsection scores were examined on 1990 mainland…

Data from 787 international undergraduate students at an urban university in the United States were used to demonstrate the importance of separating a sample into meaningful subgroups in order to demonstrate the ability of an English language assessment to predict the first-year grade point average (GPA). For example, when all students were pooled…

Eighteen studies on the validity of tests of English as a foreign language (EFL) for college admission and placement decisions are briefly summarized. No studies were found on the extent to which these tests reflect language skills, curriculum (content validity), or theory or behavior (construct validity). Instead, all of these studies…