At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the English Placement Test (EPT) is the institutional placement test that is used to place students into appropriate English as a second language (ESL) writing and/or pronunciation service courses. The EPT is used to assess the English ability of newly admitted international undergraduate…

For several decades, the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) held the preeminent role in measuring student and school performance in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Illinois. In the context of the No Child Left Behind act and new calls for accountability, the CPS has decided to include results from the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) in…

The 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) Reading Tests measured reading comprehension using both narrative and expository reading passages. Noticeable differences in mean scaled scores occurred depending on whether the 1993 results were equated back to the 1992 narrative test or the 1993 expository test (Hsu and Ackerman, 1994). In an…