Asian Association for Language Assessment

In Evaluative Language Assessments (Kunnan, 2018), I promoted two  principles: the Principle of Fairness and the Principle of Justice. In  Principle 1, I proposed that an assessment ought to be fair to all test  takers; that is, there is a presumption of treating every test taker  with equal respect with four sub-principles regarding assessments: (1)  adequate opportunity to acquire the knowledge, abilities, or skills to  be assessed; (2) consistent and meaningful in terms of its test score  interpretation; (3) free of bias, in particular, by avoiding the  assessment of construct-irrelevant matters; and (4) appropriate access,  administration, and standard-setting procedures. In Principle 2, I  proposed that an assessment institution ought to be just, bring about  benefits in society, promote positive values, and advance justice  through public reasoning with two sub-principles: (1) foster beneficial  consequences to the test-taking community and (2) promote positive  values and advance justice through public reasoning. These principles  have been used to evaluate language assessments in different contexts  (example, Hidetoshi et al., 2022).

In  this presentation, I will present an overview of the first principle  and focus on a few sub-principles related to Class 10 English language  exams. In Karnataka, schools can be affiliated to one of many Boards of  Education: the Karnataka State Educational Board (KSEB), the Central  Board of Secondary Education, and the Indian Council of Secondary  Education among others. All three Boards have English language exams for  the equivalent of Grade 10 and the latter two Boards have them for  Grade 12. These exams are part of the school leaving exams which include  exams in languages (L1s, L2, etc.) and subject exams (such as History,  Geography, Physics, etc.). The Class 10 or Secondary School Leaving  Certificate (SSLC) exams can be seen as operationalized versions of the  Boards syllabuses and curricula. A close examination of the KSEB SSLC  Class 10 exam papers for English – Second Language from 2013 to 2022 was  conducted (80 marks, 3 hours). The general findings are that there is a  mixture of tasks related to various formal lexico-grammatical features,  memory of studied literary works, reading comprehension and short  writing tasks. The lexico-grammatical tasks are generally discrete-point  test tasks that do not represent the language skill areas that might be  useful for further study or employment. The studied literary works  assess memorized responses and the single reading comprehension material  and short writing tasks also do not represent any language skills that  would be useful beyond high school. In addition, after examining all the  web links on the KSEB SSLC websites, there was no information for  public viewing that addresses other sub-principles: consistency in  scoring, bias-free test texts and items, standard-setting across exams  across administrations. Finally, given such lack of evidence in support  of the SSLC exam, it is doubtful that the exam is providing beneficial  consequences to test takers and stakeholders. In summary, this study  shows that there is little evidence to support the sub-principles of  Principle  1.