EZIELTS

Commissioning 

 

There are one or two commissions each year for each of our item writing teams. These feed material into the question paper production process. Toreflect the international nature of IELTS, test material is written by trained groups of item writers in the United Kingdom, 

Australia, New Zealand and the USA and is drawn frompublications sourced anywhere in the world. Overall test content is the responsibility of both externally commissioned language testing professionals – the chairsfor each of the Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking sub-tests – and of Cambridge ESOL staff. 

 

Item writers work from test specifications. These specifications detail the characteristics of the IELTS sub-tests, outline the requirements for commissions and guide writers in how to approach the item writing process including selecting appropriate material; developing 

suitable items and submitting material for pre-editingand editing.

 

 

Pre-editing 

 

Pre-editing is the first stage of the editing process and takes place when commissioned materials are initially submitted in draft form by item writers. A meeting is held involving chairs and Cambridge ESOL staff to review the material. 

The purpose of pre-editing is to ensure that test material is appropriate in terms of: 

• topic 

• topicality 

• level of language 

• suitability for the task 

• length 

• focus of text 

• style of writing 

• focus of task 

• level of task. 

 

At this stage, guidance is given to item writers on revising items and altering texts for 

resubmission. This is seen as an important element in item writer training and advice is also 

offered on any rejected texts and unsuitable item types. 

 

 

Editing 

 

Following pre-editing feedback, material is completed and submitted for editing. Editing takes place at meetings involving Cambridge ESOL staffand chairs. Item writers are encouraged to participate in editing meetings dealingwith their material. This is seen as 

another important part of their ongoing training. 

At editing, texts and selected items are approved forpretesting or are sent back to a writer for further revision. Revised material is then re-edited at a subsequent meeting. 

 

 

Pretest construction and Pretesting 

 

IELTS pretests are very similar to the tests that willbe used in live administrations. The tasks are in their final form including task rubrics (instructions) and examples. Listening pretests are professionally recorded to ensure that theyare of acceptable quality. Listening 

and Reading pretests are administered to IELTS candidates at selected centres or to prospective candidates on IELTS preparation courses. The pretests are marked at Cambridge ESOL and statistically analysed. Writing and Speaking pretests are administered to representative samples of candidates to assess the appropriateness of this material for use in live tests, and to establish that the tasks are capable of eliciting an adequate sample of language to allow for the assessment of candidates against the scoring criteria. 

 

 

Standards Fixing and Grading 

 

Standards fixing ensures that there is a direct link between the standard of established and new versions before they are released for use at test centres around the world. Different versions of the test all report results on the same underlying scale, but band scores 

do not always correspond to the same percentage of items correct on every test form. Before any test task is used to make important decisions,we must first establish how many correct answers on each Listening or Reading test equateto each of the nine IELTS bands. 

This ensures that band scores on each test indicate the same measure of ability. Once we are satisfied with the quality of the material, each new test task is introduced as part of a live test administration (with limited numbers of candidates and under tightly controlled conditions). We use information from this exercise to confirm our estimate of how difficult the new task is when compared to the established test material. The task is then ready to be used in combination with other material as part of a fully live test.

 

 

Test construction 

 

At regular test construction meetings, Listening and Reading papers are constructed 

according to established principles. Factors taken into account are: 

• the difficulty of complete test versions and the range of difficulty of individual items 

• the balance of topic and genre 

• the balance of gender and accent in the Listening versions 

• the balance of item format (i.e. the relative number of multiple choice and other itemtypes across versions) 

• the range of Listening/Reading skills tested. 

 

The item banking software allows the test constructor to model various test construction scenarios in order to determine which tasks should be combined to create tests that meet the requirements. Data are collected routinely from live administrations and analysed both to confirm the accuracy of the initial grading process and to support additional investigations into quality assurance issues. 

 

This is the process through which IELTS papers are prepared.