For institutions where English is the primary language of instruction, English assessments for admissions such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and International English Language Testing System (IELTS) give admissions decision-makers a sense of a student's skills in academic English. Despite this explicit purpose, these exams…

It is widely believed that human rating performance is influenced by an array of different factors. Among these, rater-related variables such as experience, language background, perceptions, and attitudes have been mentioned. One of the important rater-related factors is the way the raters interact with the rating scales. In particular, how raters…

College and university admissions officers are the gatekeepers who decide which individuals may join the "country club" of higher education. As such, the decisions they make have a significant impact on the lives of individuals, especially those who are willing to travel across the globe and risk living in an unfamiliar country in order…

An assumption underlying speaking tests is that scores reflect the ability to produce online, non-rehearsed speech. Speech produced in testing situations may, however, be less spontaneous if extensive test preparation takes place, resulting in memorized or rehearsed responses. If raters detect these patterns, they may conceptualize speech as…

There are increasing numbers of non-native English speaking applicants to Canadian universities (AUCC 2008a, 2010), which are committed to promoting linguistic and cultural diversity (AUCC 2008b). One result of this trend is that university admissions officers, as gatekeepers, are faced with a growing and potentially confusing array of language…