This article presents the author's response to Xiaoming Xi's paper titled "How do we go about investigating test fairness?" In the paper, Xi offers "a means to fully integrate fairness investigations and practice". Given the current importance accorded to fairness in the language testing community, Xi makes a case for viewing fairness as an aspect…

In language programs, it is crucial to place incoming students into appropriate levels to ensure that course curriculum and materials are well targeted to their learning needs. Deciding how and where to set cutscores on placement tests is thus of central importance to programs, but previous studies in educational measurement disagree as to which…

Discusses the role of the Rasch model IRT in evaluating two subtests of the Occupational English test and argues for its use in exploring test constructs and in considering the implications of the empirical analysis presented for the validity of communicative language tests involving speaking and writing skills. (39 references) (Author/JL)