In the United States, government mandates for educational accountability have prompted an increase in testing in K-12 and higher education settings, resulting in a generation of millennial students who have undergone repeated assessment over the course of their educational careers. The cumulative effects of testing may range from increasingly…

The process of constructing assessment scales for performance testing is complex and multi-dimensional. As a result, a number of different approaches, both empirically and intuitively based, are open to developers. In this paper we outline the approach taken in the revision of a set of assessment scales used with speaking tests, and present the…