At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Test of Oral Proficiency (TOP), an internally developed oral proficiency test, is administered to international teaching assistant (ITA) candidates to ensure an appropriate level of academic oral English proficiency. Test taker performances are rated live by two raters according to four subscales.…

Mixed-format assessments are increasingly being used in large scale standardized assessments to measure a continuum of skills ranging from basic recall to higher order thinking skills. These assessments are usually comprised of a combination of (a) multiple-choice items which can be efficiently scored, have stable psychometric properties, and…