Asian Association for Language Assessment

I  started to be interested in the history of language testing when I was  studying the origins of TOEFL and wondered what had preceded my own  entry into the field. I was struck by two major examples, the  2000-year-old Chinese Imperial examination which was aimed at selecting a  tiny elite and the medieval Treviso test where local leaders checked  what pupils had learnt in school. The Jesuits brought the Chinese  examination back to Europe, and used it in their classrooms but with  secularization of Christian schools, it became the basis under the  French Revolution and Napoleonic centralized rule for mass control of  education. In Britain too, it started as an elite selection process for  the Indian Civil Service but by the end of the 19th century controlled  mass education. This was the model that developed in post-World War I  USA, where industrialization took over. Nowadays, testing is big  business, and the high status of public standardized exams produces the  examination hell and cheating in Asia. In this talk, I will consider  these and other problems and the challenges faced in developing fairer  tests and in lowering the stakes.