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Test review 7(67,1*
Language Testing
30(4) 565–573
The National Center Test for © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0265532213483095
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Yoshinori Watanabe
Sophia University, Japan
The National Center Test for University Admissions (henceforth, the Center Test) is a
unified national test of all high school subjects taken by more than 500,000 students
each year in Japan. The Center Test has been implemented since 1990, superseding its
predecessor, the Common First-Stage Examination, which was administered from 1979
to 1989. Its English component had consisted only of the written section until 2005
when the listening section was first implemented after a series of preparatory research
studies (Nishigoori & Kuramoto, 2010). The test is designed and produced by the
National Center for University Entrance Examinations (henceforth, the NCUEE, www.
dnc.ac.jp/), an independent administrative institution. The content of the Centre Test is
aligned with the guideline titled the Course of Study for secondary or high schools pre-
scribed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan
(MEXT). Before going into the details of the test, the context for its use is briefly
described below.
In Japan, there are two major types of universities. Of approximately 750 four-
year-course universities, 20% are national and local public and 80% are private. In the
case of national and local public universities, they all have to follow a two-stage
admission process. At the first stage they administer a common test, and at the second
stage they carry out their in-house examination on their own campus. Unlike national
and local public institutions, private universities have the freedom of employing their
own methods, which vary widely. Some universities administer their own paper-and-
pencil test on their own campus, while other universities conduct interviews and/or
essay exams as well.
The Center Test was initially developed as the first-stage examination of national and
local public universities, though recently an increasing number of private universities
(500 as of 2012) are also administering the test to make use of the scores as part of their
admission decisions. The test covers all six academic school subjects with 28 subdivi-
sions, including Japanese, geography, history, mathematics, science, a foreign language,
and so forth. The foreign language section includes French, German, Korean, Chinese
and English. The present review deals only with the test of English.
Corresponding author:
Yoshinori Watanabe, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Sophia University, 7-1 Kioi-cho,
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, Japan.
Email: yjwatana@gmail.com; yoshin-w@sophia.ac.jp
566 Language Testing 30(4)
Test purposes
The Center Test is an achievement test, in that it purports to measure the student’s
achievement level at the point of finishing the last year of upper secondary education,
and the coverage has to be within the content of the MEXT guidelines. It is also a
certification test, in that the test score is used to guarantee that the student who has
obtained a certain level of scores is judged to possess the knowledge and skills required
to enter or take the second-stage examination that each university carries out on its own
campus (NCUEE, 2012a, p. 466). Although its primary purpose is to provide information
that is to be used as part of selecting students for university admission, as with any other
test of this nature the Center Test has a secondary purpose that requires independent vali-
dation. That is, it aims to help improve teaching and learning at pre-college-level educa-
tion by reinforcing the content of the Course of Study, which requires teachers to instruct
students so that they can acquire practical communication skills in the four areas of
comprehension, production, knowledge of language and culture, and positive attitudes
towards communication in English.
This necessitates that the students write answers on their own test books, and bring them
back home to check their answers in the light of the answer key released.
General description
All the items of both the written and listening components are multiple-choice. NCUEE
(2012a) requires the test constructors to follow specific guidelines in summary as fol-
lows: (1) to assess practical communication skills (specified in the MEXT guideline);
(2) to use present-day English; (3) to assess sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic
knowledge as well as discrete linguistic knowledge; (4) to cover a wide range of topics;
(5) to include items of various levels of difficulty; and (6) to use vocabulary from the
coverage of high school textbooks.
The written component (a total of 200 points) is divided into six major sections, while
the listening component (a total of 50 points) has four major sections. Tables 1 and 2
show a general description of the 2012 test battery.
As Tables 1 and 2 indicate, and as Guest’s (2008) detailed analyses of previous
years’ test papers attest, the Center Test contains various tasks requiring test takers to
employ a range of skills and strategies for language use to answer the questions. It
certainly suffers from limitations (see also Brown, 2000), because it has to operate
under a number of practical constraints. Amongst others, as has been already noted,
the most important and possibly unique practice involves releasing all test items and
key into the public domain immediately after administration, which in turn necessi-
tates the use of objectively scorable items. As if compensating for the limitation, the
NCUEE strongly recommends that each university use open-ended, subjective-type
questions at its second stage (NCUEE, 2012b, p. 2). In fact, most of the second-stage
568 Language Testing 30(4)
Table 1. A description of the 2012 Center Test in a summary form (NCUEE, 2012a): Written
Component.
Table 2. A description of the 2012 Center Test in a summary form (NCUEE, 2012a): Listening
Component.
questions in the light of the MEXT guidelines, the previous year’s review and the year’s
guidelines prepared by NCUEE (NCUEE, 2012a, p. 455). Most of the reviews are
sensible, admitting that the test has to inevitably focus on receptive skills, and positive
comments are not uncommon: ‘test tasks epitomize what a test of practical communica-
tion skills should look like’ (NCUEE, 2012a, p. 462, my translation). Yet there are often
differences in views between the test construction committee and the groups of test
reviewers, which turn out to be extremely useful for revising the test for the following
year. For example, the reviews of in-service teachers and the research society seem to
be concerned about score weight in the light of the difficulty of each task, the quantity
of the entire test battery in terms of the total number of words because the students have
to process them within a given length of time, and other practical concerns about test
takers (NCUEE, 2012a, p. 462).
The third condition concerns the achievement level of the test takers. This is to be
examined in the light of candidates’ performance on each item of the test. The 2012
post-test report considers the result of the mean scores being 124.15 with a 42.05
standard deviation to be on the appropriate level overall (NCUEE, 2012a, p. 466).
Details of the item statistics are not revealed to the public but are available for internal
use only, for the sake of committee members. Nevertheless, each section of the written
and listening components is presented and discussed in the report, so anyone who is
interested in this type of information may look at it online. This in turn helps to keep
the NCUEE and the test development committee accountable to the stakeholders for
the quality of the test.
Of all types of evidence, the most difficult to obtain is the fourth one, concerning the
predictability of the test scores for the readiness of the candidates for university-level
education. This is particularly true because the test of a foreign language comprises only
a part of the entire set of information along with other subjects. Besides, as has been
noted above, admission decisions may be made by combining the score of the Center
Test with that of the second-stage examination. The issue then may require an in-depth
analysis of the function of the Center Test at each institution. Likewise, the fifth type of
evidence, which relates to the impact of the test on pre-college-level education, has been
lacking and therefore research in this area is urgently needed.
particularly because it often has to be done in parallel with the tests of other subjects. If
changes are made to any degree, an announcement has to be issued in advance to all the
stakeholders including parents, teachers, university admission officers, as well as test
takers (Watanabe, 2010).
Appraisal
The Center Test makes a unique contribution to the field of educational assessment in
Japan. However, there are several challenges that the NCUEE will have to face in the
future. Amongst others, one of the most urgent involves empirically validating the use of
test scores by establishing backing to support assumptions, such as the types of evidence
illustrated in the previous section on validation. Indeed, the test use is currently validated
in the light of post-test information from different perspectives. The NCUEE also receives
informal reviews from various private institutions and opinions from test users.
Nevertheless, they are yet to be systematized into the whole process of test validation to
help inform the test committee during the following year’s test construction process.
Validation should preferably be incorporated into a routine that the NCUEE carries out
every year.
Another challenge involves clarifying the division of labor between written and lis-
tening components. One of the recurrent issues is the possibility of eliminating the sec-
tion of pronunciation in the light of empirical research (e.g. Buck, 1989; Shirahata,
1991). However, the section continues to be part of the test battery, importantly because
of the favorable comment from the two bodies of high school teachers (NCUEE, 2012a,
pp. 466–467) that it has possible positive washback to school education, in the way in
which the task is likely to gear teachers’ and students’ attention to the sounds of English.
However, this is an assumption that is yet to be validated empirically.
572 Language Testing 30(4)
Finally, it would be very useful for test users and stakeholders if the NCUEE were to
release the item statistics, reliability coefficients, standard error of measurement, and so
forth, along with explanatory notes written in down-to-earth terms. This type of informa-
tion will serve as an extremely useful resource for many people involved with the Centre
Test. For example, it will help inform the faculty of each university as to what type of
knowledge and skills are to be tested in their second-stage examination to compensate for
what the Center Test could not appropriately measure. For the high school teachers, the
information could be used to provide students with informed guidance for their test
preparation.
Conclusion
The NCUEE has been playing an important role in developing and administering a series
of tests under severe practical constraints in the Japanese educational system. It also
conducts a number of empirical research studies and publishes them, thereby releasing a
huge amount of information online as well as in print to enlighten the general public.
Meanwhile, it also hosts a number of international conferences. Indeed, a number of
challenges are there for them to face. But it is hoped that the effort the institution has
been making will continue to bear fruit and ultimately bring even greater service to the
international research community as well as those practitioners who are involved in
high-stakes assessment where there are similar types of constraints.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my hearty thanks to the NCUEE, in particular Ms. Yaeko Ito of Information
Service Office and Dr. Shojima Kojiro of Division of Research Development.
Funding
Production of this paper has partly supported by the Gants-in-Aid for Scientific Research by the
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science #23520701.
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