As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

This article reviews assessment practices of Japanese as a second language as taught in Japan since the 1980s. It begins with an explanation of the social and political conditions that have impacted assessment practices in Japan and then addresses current assessment practices and issues. This analysis first examines large-scale tests developed in…

Notable mean score differences for the "e-rater"® automated scoring engine and for humans for essays from certain demographic groups were observed for the "GRE"® General Test in use before the major revision of 2012, called rGRE. The use of e-rater as a check-score model with discrepancy thresholds prevented an adverse impact…