1)Standardized test is a consistent and structured assessment used in educational field

such as schools, colleges, and universities to measures the knowledge, skills, abilities, or
aptitude of the test takers. This test is administered and scored by following certain
procedures which was made by organizations or institutions that specialized in
educational testing and assessment. Examples of standardized test are TOEFL
(Teaching of English as a Foreign Language), SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test),IELTS
(International English Language Testing System), GRE (Graduate Record
Examination).
A. Advantages of Standardized Test

• Objectivity: Based on its consistent format and scoring criteria, standardized test
ensure fairness and provide an objective way in measuring the test takers
performances.
• Accountability: A standardized test measure of students’ performance allow
improvement in educational institution for the quality of education they provide.
• College and career readiness: A standardized test provide a common measure that can
be used by institutions to assess a large number of applicants.

B. Disadvantages of Standardized Test

• Narrow Assessment: A standardized test only focus on a limited range of subjects and
skills. these narrow focus often not captured the students’ abilities and skills to a wider
range.
• Limited feedback: Lack of detailed feedback may result to a poor improvement of the
students’ performances. Feedback is important to understand the strength and
weakness in the ability of the test takers, this allow them to make improveme nt for
further performances.
2). Answer
Practicality relates to the considerations of cost of a test, time allotment, test
administration, human resource, test construction, and test scoring (brown, 2004: 19). A
good test should be relatively low in cost. It should be affordable by the students or test-
takers. Requiring our senior high school students to take a toefl test (which costs more than
$100 for each student) for a mid-semester test will be too expensive for the current financial
condition of parents in indonesia.
For the test construction, we may, for instance, use essay-type test, which is easy to construct
but takes time to score, or use multiple-choice test, which takes longer time to construct but is
easy to score. In this case, if the number of students or test-takers is big, e.g. 300 students,
multiple-choice test will be more practical, because it takes a long time only in constructing
the test but the scoring can be fast. If the number of students or test-takers is small, e.g. fewer
than 50 students, essay-type test can be used. In this case, constructing essay-type test does
not take a long time, and the scoring is still manageable
Reliability means consistency, i.e. consistency in relation to students or test-takers, raters
or scorers, test administration, and the test itself. There are several factors which affect
assessment reliability. The raters or scorers of a test should possess reliability. They should
be consistent in scoring a test.
There are two kinds of rater reliability, i.e. intra- rater reliability and inter-rater reliability.
Intra-rater reliability means consistency within the rater/scorer himself/herself. If a writing
test done by student a is scored 80 today, and a week later, the same rater still gives 80 (or a
bit higher or lower) as he/she re-scores the same test for this student, it means that the rater is
consistent or has intra-rater reliability. On the other hand, if student a is scored 80 today, and
a week later he/she is scored 60 or 90 by the same rater, we say that the rater is not
consistent; in other words, the rater does not have or has low intra-rater reliability.

Validity is usually defined as a test or assessment which is used to measure what is

supposed to be measured. This section discusses some aspects related to validity, i.e. content-
related validity, criterion-related validity, construct- related validity, consequential validity,
and face validity (brown & abeywickrama, 2010: 29-36). They are elaborated below.
Content-related validity refers to the validity of the content of a test in relation to its
objective. For example, in the teaching-learning process we teach language assessment using
heaton’s (1988) book about assessing language skills, but for the summative test we use the
test materials from o’malley and pierce (1996), which is about authentic assessment, then our
test is not valid. When we teach narrative texts to our students, and then the test materials are
in the form of argumentative texts, our test is not valid. However, if we teach a legend of
malin kundang to our students, and the test uses a legend of tangkuban prahu, our test is still
valid, because both legends belong to the same narrative type texts.

Authenticity can mean the degree of closeness of the test tasks to the real-life tasks in the
target language (bachman & palmer, 1996: 23). Regarding the features, brown and
abeywickrama (2010: 37) mention that authentic assessment:
1. Contains language that is as natural as possible
2. Has items that are contextualized rather than isolated
3. Includes meaningful, relevant, interesting topics
4. Provides some thematic organization to items, such as through a story line or
episode
5. Offers tasks that replicate real-world tasks

An example of natural language in an oral interaction can be seen in the

Following dialog.
A. What’s your name?
B. Sintha
C. Where are you from?
 D. Malang

In such a dialog, sometimes a teacher requires his/her student to answer the above
questions using complete sentences, such as in the following.

A. What’s your name?

B. My name is Sintha
C. Where are you from?
D. I am from Malang

The complete answers made by B in this example do not reflect the natural English as
used by the native speaker. For authentic assessment we have to use natural English,
as required in CLT method. An example of contextual test is when we test
vocabulary. Rather than asking:
Write the meaning of “trivial”
It is better to have the following item: “The students think that the test is difficult, but
the teacher regards it as trivial.” The underlined word means....

Washback can be defined as the effect of test or assessment on teaching, learning, learner,
or government and society. Washback can be positive or negative. For example, since there is
a writing test in the national examination, teachers who were previously reluctant to teach
writing, then they teach writing. Knowing that the test is always challenging to the students,
then the students are motivated to learn and make better preparation for the test. These are
examples of positive washback. However, when teachers know that the national examination
always uses multiple choice test items, then in the teaching and learning activities the
teachers drill their students on how to do multiple choice test, forgetting teaching students the
process of learning, this is an example of negative washback. Or, knowing multiple choice
examination, students are busy preparing the effective strategy for cheating. This is the worst
negativewashback.
3) For assessing speaking, there are 5 types that we should know. For imitative is basically
the ability to simply parrot back (imitate) a word or phrase or possibly a sentence, The second
type of speaking is Intensive; to developing competence in a narrow range of grammatical,
phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationships (prosodic elements -Intonation, stress, rhythm,
etc.). Responsive assessment tasks include interaction and test comprehension but at a
somewhat restricted level such as very short dialogue, standard greetings and small talk, and
simple requests and comments, for example Alexa: Excuseme, do you have the time? Alex:
Yeah Nine-fifteen. Interactive involve multiple interactions and multiple participants.
Extensive (monologue) Extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral presentations,
and storytelling.
Distinguishing between imitative and intensive, and between responsive and interactive
 Imitative is basically the ability to simply parrot back (imitate) a word or phrase or
possibly a sentence, While Intensive to developing competence in a narrow range of
grammatical, phrasal, lexical, or phonological relationships (prosodic elements -
 intonation, stress, rhythm, etc.)

 The difference between responsive and interactive conversations lies in the length and
complexity of the dialogue, which may involve multiple interactions and multiple
participants.

4). Answer
Implied in the taxonomy above is a notion of what makes many aspects of lis
tening difficult, or why listening is not simply a linear process of recording
strings of language as they are transmitted into our brains. Developing a sense
of which aspects of listening performance are predictably difficult will help you
to challenge your st dents appropriately and to assign weights to items. Consider
the following list of what makes listening difficult (adapted from Richards,
1983; Ur, 1984; Dunkel, 1991).
1. Clustering: attending to appropriate “chunks” of language-phrases,
clauses, constituents
2. Redundancy: recognizing the kinds of repetitions, rephrasing,
elaborations, and insertions that unrehearsed spoken language often
contains, and bene-fiting from that recognition
3. Reduced forms: understanding the reduced forms that may not have been
a part of an English learner’s past learning experiences in classes where
only formal “textbook” language has been presented
4. Performance variables: being able to weed out” hesitations, false starts.
Pauses, and corrections in natural speech
5. Colloquial language: comprehending idioms, slang, reduced forms,
shared cultural knowledge
6. Rate of delivery: keeping up with the speed of delivery, processing
automatically as the speaker continues
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation: correctly understanding prosodic elements
spoken language, which is almost always much more difficult than under-
standing the smaller phonological bits and pieces
8. Interaction: managing the interactive flow of language from listening to
speaking to listening, etc.

5). Answer
Imitative
Imitative writing is focused strictly on the grammatical aspects of writing. The student simply
reproduces what they see. This is a common way to teach children how to write. Additional
examples of activities at this level include cloze task in which the student has to write the
word in the blank from a list, spelling test, matching, and even converting numbers to their
word equivalent.
Intensive
Intensive writing is more concern about selecting the appropriate word for a given context.
Example activities include grammatical transformation, such as changing all verbs to past
tense, sequencing pictures, describing pictures, completing short sentences, and ordering task.
Responsive
Responsive writing involves the development of sentences into paragraphs. The purpose
depends almost exclusively on the context or function of writing. Form concerns are
primarily at the discourse level which means how the sentences work together to make
paragraphs and how the paragraphs work to support a thesis statement. Normally no more
than 2-3 paragraphs at this level. Example activities at the responsive level include short
reports, interpreting visual aids, and summary.
Extensive
Extensive writing is responsive writing over the course of an entire essay or research paper.
The student is able to shape a purpose, objectives, main ideas, conclusions, etc. Into a
coherent paper. For many students, this is exceedingly challenging in their mother tongue and
is further exasperated in a second language. There is also the experience of multiple drafts of
a single paper.