What makes a good test?

A good test should be reliable, practical, and easy to mark. A reliable test is one that is as objective as possible, so that the student should receive the same results regardless of who is marking it. Practicality should be considered in terms of the length and difficulty of the test – both from the point of view of the students taking the test and the teacher marking the test. Revising for the test using similar types of questions should encourage students to engage in useful practice.

Different types of test questions

Test questions are either direct or indirect. Testing is said to be ‘direct’ when students are tested on their ability to use a skill by actually using that skill to carry out a communicative task. For example, if you want to test how well your students can write a letter of complaint, you could ask them to write a letter of complaint. Direct testing is the obvious choice when it comes to testing the productive skills of speaking and writing.

Indirect testing focuses on students’ knowledge of language construction, rather than their ability to use it in actual communication.

Test questions are also either discrete or integrative. Discrete item testing involves testing one element of language at a time, whereas integrative testing requires students to use a variety of different language and skills to complete a task. Generally, discrete item testing is indirect and integrative testing tends to be direct.

Multiple choice questions are straightforward for students to complete, quick for teachers to mark and, as long as there is only one possible answer, totally objective.

Indirect testing of discrete language items is a useful way to check whether students have learned grammatical structures and vocabulary items that have recently been introduced.

For example:

1. My birthday is ________ September.

a) on

b) at

c) in

d) the

2. Some people like ________ risks, whereas others prefer to play it safe.

a) doing

b) taking

c) having

d) making

Other types of indirect testing include the same types of tasks we use to provide controlled written practice, such as fill-in-the blanks questions, jumbled sentences, correcting mistakes, discrimination exercises and sentence completion tasks.

When it comes to testing students’ skills, it is important to make sure that the test is ‘valid.’ A valid test tests what it is supposed to test. For example, if one section of the test is designed to test students’ listening skills, it is essential that it focuses exclusively on listening skills – not reading or writing skills. Both the questions and the answers should be short and straightforward. Use of multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blanks, labelling and sentence completion tasks helps to keep the amount of reading and writing to a minimum.