Responding to the challenge of delivering valid assessments during the unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly not easy. However, the efforts will undoubtedly lead to developments in the field of language assessment. This special issue closes with a brief summary of the commentaries it contains and raises some unanswered…

When the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to do in-person, on campus testing, we were forced to create a new system to screen International Teaching Assistants (ITA) for Temple university. We used this opportunity to address many of the concerns and problems that we had identified with the previous test, and created a new test that could be…

The TOEFL iBT test was introduced in 2005 to better reflect the language demands of real-life academic tasks than did previous versions of the test. The task-based design of the test was intended to support the interpretation of its scores as a trustworthy measure of international students' ability to use English in an academic environment. Until…

The online placement test for the Community English Language Program (CLP) at Teachers College, Columbia University has been administered in a computer lab since 2015. While most of the components of this placement exam system are online, including registration, exam delivery, scoring, and score reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic elevated the need…

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is a computer adaptive test of English proficiency that is increasingly used for English-medium university admissions purposes. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, test centers were shut down in many countries, and major tests including the TOEFL iBT and IELTS could not be administered. The DET is an "at…