Is there a resource that talks about the differences between all the English Tests people take here?
I’m dying to know what the differences are, how the tests are conducted, etc.
TIA!
Matt
Almas John answered this question once many years ago, but I recall that it was a short post and things may have changed a bit since then. It’s probably worth writing up a longer explanation for future reference, but as my knowledge is by no means complete or 100% accurate, maybe others can add their knowledge below and/or I/the mods can edit it into this post.
(Edit, this has taken me four bloody hours. I give up. Will someone else please proofread and correct this, then add the missing info? Thanks)
First, a primer on “the system”:
As originally set up, everyone was entitled to free education up to the end of junior high. (Age 14/15) Then they took a test, and those who passed would go on to senior high. (Sorry, but I don’t know the name of this test. Perhaps someone can help?) The SH’s are fairly well-funded (I know of one that has it’s own planetarium) and as the students are of similar abilities and fairly competitive with each other, going to one pretty much guarantees a place at university. University places are awarded on the basis of grades in the Joint College Entrance Examination, which is taken in the third year of SH.
The original universities are known as “national universities,” and the biggest and best is NTU (Taida). Failing your test at the end of Junior HS means you don’t go to a public HS, but there used to be a lot of vocational schools (3yrs) and junior colleges (5yrs) which prepared students for employment in ‘trades’ rather than ‘professions’. However, nobody wants their kids to take this route, so a whole parallel system has grown up which is mostly for-profit rather than for the good of the population.
Private Senior HSs will try and get you through the JCEE if you don’t get into the public HSs. Many of them used to be vocational schools. Private Junior HSs aim to prepare kids for the test to get into Senior HSs. Some of them are very successful, so they have their own entrance tests for 11yo kids which effectively ensures that their averages will be higher three years later. So we have a situation where the brighter kids are in private Junior HSs and then in public Senior HSs.
The pattern is reversed for the less able.
And of course, there is a huge industry giving kids a “head start” by working them to death before they even get to junior HS. I don’t know anything about how that works.
All this creates demand for university places, and due to the glory of capitalism there are now enough universities to ensure that anyone who wants one can obtain a degree. Many of these new universities used to be junior colleges, technical schools, and so on. The big talking point in one of my classes recently was a report that a student had been awarded a university place with a score of 7 in the JCEE. That’s not 7%. According to my students, the highest possible score is 400. So, 7 out of 400!
Naturally, a university degree is no longer considered valuable unless it’s from one of the top national schools. So students ‘top up’ by going overseas to take a Master’s Degree, for which they need to pass an internationally recognised English test.
The last figures I heard, which maybe someone else can verify, are:
Graduates per year: 297,000 (97% of high school graduates)
Number studying overseas: ~30,000, divided roughly equally between the UK (leading by a whisker), the USA, and the rest of the world. Most of ‘the rest’ that I meet are going to Australia, with a few going to other places like Germany and Switzerland, but they may not be representative.
OK, so on to the tests:
The killer is at the end of Junior HS. This is viewed as ‘make or break’, and pretty much the whole third year is devoted to test preparation. It’s a fiercely competitive free market, and everything else takes second place. You’ll see Junior HSs with banners outside proclaiming the number of students who went on to public schools recently. Then there’s the JCEE, which is similarly important.
Both of these tests, I believe, include an English component. But as a foreign teacher don’t expect to ever be told anything about them. Teaching people English and getting them into university are different jobs. We could pretty much forget about them, except for the impact that this has on anything you do with HS students.
Students are tested weekly in both Junior and Senior HS. And every six weeks classes stop for a few days for the ‘big tests’.
This is to ensure that everyone is keeping up so that they’ll be ready for the really big test at the end. As classes are typically 40-50 students, and teachers have a lot of classes, it’s not feasible for them to grade tests by hand. Everything is done using multiple-choice tests, with the answers being marked on a card to be read by a computer. So, the emphasis in English teaching is on teaching things that can be tested easily. Basically, we’re talking receptive skills. Students only learn to spot the right answer, they don’t learn to produce anything.
(Caveat: let’s not blame the local teachers for this, as many of them are aware of the problem but have to work within the system.)
So, up until university the only ‘essential’ tests are the general tests which contain some English component and decide their future educational path.
After graduating, we enter the world of IELTS and TOEFL.
Test of English as a Foreign Language - developed in the USA as a uniform measure of language ability by ETS, the same people that run the normal college entrance exams there. (I just looked at Wikipedia and there appears to be a lot of criticism about ETS.)
International English Language Testing System - developed jointly by Cambridge in the UK and IDP in Australia for the same purpose as TOEFL. There are two versions, the academic and the general test. The general test is used in Canada to test people emigrating there.
(I didn’t see any criticism of IELTS anywhere, but I didn’t really look. It is fair to say that both organisations are ssentially monopolistic for-profit businesses masquerading as being for the public good.)
Both tests are divided into four sections: reading, writing, listening and speaking. They are pretty similar in terms of what you need to know in order to get a good score. IELTS is taken with a pen and paper. TOEFL has evolved from paper-based, to computer-based, to internet-based.
The TOEFL iBT is considered to be more difficult by Taiwanese because it does a better job of testing integrated skills. For instance, the first writing task involves listening to someone making an argument for or against a proposition, reading a counter argument, and then summarising the two arguments. The first writing task in IELTS is simpler, itrequires students to write a report describing a graph, comparing two graphs, explaining a process, or similar. In other words, both require the student to write a report. The report should be at least 150 words, and the time recommended is 20 minutes.
Writing task 2, in both IELTS and TOEFL, is a personal essay of at least 250 words making an argument. Total time allowed is 55 minutes for TOEFL (I think) and 60 minutes for IELTS.
IELTS contains three reading passages, of similar difficulty but dealing with different types of topics. TOEFL contains 3-5 topics. Both tests allow one hour for the reading section.
TOEFL listening involves six sections over 50 minutes. From Wikipedia: The passages consist of two student conversations and four academic lectures or discussions. The questions ask the students to determine main ideas, details, function, stance, inferences, and overall organization.
IELTS listening is four sections over 30 minutes. They cover a simple conversation about a topic such as shopping or making a plan, filling in a form, a lecture on a general topic, and a discussion about something academic or technical. The four sections get progressively harder.
TOEFL speaking, according to Wikipedia, is 20 minutes: It consists of six tasks, two independent tasks and four integrated tasks. In the two independent tasks, students must answer opinion questions about some aspect of academic life. In two integrated reading, listening, and speaking tasks, students must read a passage, listen to a passage, and speak about how the ideas in the two passages are related. In two integrated listening and speaking tasks, students must listen to long passages and then summarize and offer opinions on the information in the passages. Test takers are expected to convey information, explain ideas, and defend opinions clearly, coherently, and accurately.
IELTS contains three speaking tasks. The first is basically small talk about home, study, work, travel, etc. 3-5 mins. The second requires the student to speak for 1-2 minutes on a topic provided by the examiner, with one minute to prepare, and possibly answer a supplementary question. Part three involves the examiner asking a few difficult questions which expand on the topic in part 2. Total time, 11-14 minutes.
TOEFL iBT is scored 0-120, with each section carrying 30 points. Speaking is initially scored 0-4 and writing 0-5. These numbers are then scaled up to give a score out of 30. The totals for each section are added together.
IELTS is scored by band, 0-9. Each section is scored separately, to the nearest half-band(eg 5.0 or 5.5), and the scores are then averaged to give an overall score. You can see how the tasks are graded at this page, and there are links at the bottom to download pdf’s detailing exactly what the examiners want. This stuff is invaluable for helping to straighten out students who have been conditioned to study the wrong things and need to know why this test is different from what they are used to.
I don’t have figures for TOEFL, but average scores in Taiwan for IELTS in 2007 were:
[quote]Listening: 5.58
Reading: 5.79
Writing: 5.18
Speaking: 5.64
Overall: 5.59[/quote]
Next time someone tells you that Taiwanese students can write better than they can speak then show them those figures!(Lots more numbers on the IELTS website.)
With regards to IELTS, most universities require students to get 6.5 overall, and will set a minimum requirement for each section too. Apparently, the places with the highest requirements (8.5) are in the USA. IELTS is accepted by most US universities as proof of language proficiency, and conversely it is perfectly acceptable to use American English in the IELTS test - as long as you do so consistently! You can’t ask what colour the elevator is, or what color the lift is. TOEFL is accepted by most universities worldwide, however the test apparently requires US English only. I don’t know what TOEFL grades would be required by universities, but there’s a comparison chart available here.
The other international tests you may hear about are TOEIC and BULATS:
Test Of English for International Communication - another offering from ETS.
Business Language Testing System - created by Cambridge in association with a bunch of European universities as part of the Common European Framework for Language Learning. (see below.)
TOEIC and BULATS are designed to test language competence for business. TOEIC is well-known and many people take the test. BULATS is almost unheard of in Taiwan at the moment.
TOEIC originally was a reading/listening test, but has now been revised to include speaking and writing sections. The listening section now uses a variety of accents from different countries, in response to the criticism that it’s not “international” if it is biased towards US English. Other than that I don’t know a lot about it.
BULATS is interesting but again I don’t know much about it. Take a look at the website and try out the practise tests. It’s cool because it sets the questions in response to the quality of the answers you give. So they get harder if you get them right, and easier if you’re having problems. Then it uses some sophisticated algorithm to give you a score. It’s intended for use within organisations, and I believe it can be administered without supervision - anywhere - as its purpose is to give the student a measure of his own ability to help make choices about further study, rather than be a requirement for anything.
OK, enough about international tests except to add this: In 2007, of the 20 countries in which most people took IELTS, Taiwan ranked number 14. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia all ranked above Taiwan. I pulled the numbers from the IELTS page linked above and sorted them on my own website.
The other big test you hear about is the GEPT.
GEPT was initiated in the nineties, and was apparently conceived because it was felt that Taiwanese are at a disadvantage when taking international tests because they are culturally specific. The argument goes that TW students don’t get a fair chance to show off their language skills because the tests ask them to talk about unfamiliar topics.This ignores the data above about Taiwan’s ranking compared to other countries with the same problem, but whatever. Obviously, if you can’t speak English international standards then the best thing to do is work to your own standards rather than change the way you teach.
GEPT is created and administered by LTTC, another ‘non-profit’ which makes lots of money. (LTTC also administers the various ETS tests in Taiwan, and BULATS. ie everything except IELTS.) Originally, ATI (US embassy) was listed as being involved with LTTC, but nowadays it seems to be run entirely by local people. LTTC is based on the campus of NTU, but is not part of the university.
There are five levels to GEPT: Elementary (held twice a year), Intermediate (twice a year), High Intermediate (twice a year), Advanced (once a year), and Superior (on request). At one point LTTC apparently published tables claiming that a pass at one or other level was equivalent to X score in the international tests. I heard (but can’t verify) that the British Council/IDP complained about this, and the comparison seems to have disappeared. More recently it was announced that GEPT would be made to conform to the CEF, and the GEPT website now describes the different levels of the test in terms of what students are expected to be able to do. But there’s no indication that GEPT is conforms to anything, is recognised by anyone else in the world, or even that any non-Taiwanese person is involved with it at all.
At each level, the test is administered in two parts. Part 1 tests receptive skills, reading and listening, and consists of multiple choice answers, graded by computer. If you pass this you can go on to take part 2, productive skills, writing and speaking. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the speaking part is automated and recorded for grading later.
Instead of getting a score you either pass or fail at each level. I believe this is the case, anyway, however LTTC are very reticent about sharing information. Their website is an advertisement for how great they are, but contains no information about how grades are awarded.
I have also never met a high school English teacher who could tell me what is important to the examiners. Do they want long rambling sentences that never get to the point but do contain lots of big words? Or do they want tightly-structured compositions with short concise sentences? Or what? This information is not made available.
I’ve taught classes of Taiwanese English teachers who wanted to take the advanced test, and their homework from me was to find the GEPT equivalent for the info linked to above for IELTS. Nobody could find anything, and calls to LTTC are met with “we don’t provide any information to anyone about what the test contains.” One forumosan reported trying to take the test a while back to try and find out what was in it, but was refused permission because he wasn’t Taiwanese. I didn’t bother looking for the post, but I think he said that they told him they didn’t want him giving his students an unfair advantage.
(A little nugget I obtained from a student who had taken the test is that students are not allowed any scrap paper and may not write on the question paper except in the areas provided for answers. This means that there is nowhere they can brainstorm and plan compositions. I would love to have this clarified.)
Despite this, a huge industry has grown up around GEPT and there are lots of books available. As LTTC don’t tell anyone what is expected, it’s hard to know if the books actually prepare the students properly. They’re nearly all written by Taiwanese, and many of them are riddled with bad grammar, misspellings and blatant Chinglish. For all I know, they could be the result of insider information that accurately represent what the examiners want. Or they could be complete crap. It’s hard to know, and the head of English at one of the top public schools in Taipei expressed frustration to me a while ago about this. She was hoping that I could tell her what is expected of the students.
In the absence of any other information, many schools buy programs from organisations such as LiveABC and Studio Classroom which purports to be GEPT-preparation material. How do these for-profit companies know what is required if the public high schools don’t? Then they try and find some way to include this material alongside the regular curriculum. There is absolutely no integration between GEPT and the school system. It’s a law unto itself.
GEPT is considered important because the government has given it a lot of prominence. It is claimed that passing GEPT to such and such a level is a pre-requisite for promotion of government employees. I’ve never had the opportunity to ask “if a candidate has achieved a good score in an internationally recognised test are you going to insist that he also take GEPT?”
It is also commonly said that GEPT is a requirement for admission to university. However, the numbers don’t stack up. Figures were published for while, but I haven’t seen anything new since 2005. The figures that used to be available on the GEPT website seem to have been removed, but fortunately they were preserved on Wikipedia and I’ll reproduce them here for posterity:
[quote]The total number of examinees to take the first stage of the elementary test through early 2005 was over 500,000. The passing rate for the first stage of the test is currently approximately 40%. The passing rate for examinees taking the second stage is approximately 77%.
The number of examinees taking stage one of the intermediate test totals over 300,000, with a passing rate of approximately 34% for the first stage and 33% for the second stage.
The high-intermediate level of the test has had a total of approximately 60,000 through 2004, and passing rates of 32% and 30% respectively for stages one and two.
The total number of examinees who have taken the advanced test is approximately 3,000. The passing rate for stage one is approximately 21% and 16% for stage two.[/quote]
So, at the intermediate and high intermediate level it appears that less than 10% of test-takers are capable of passing the test. Nevertheless we have a figure of 297,000 graduates per year. How do these people get into university if GEPT is a requirement? When I challenge people on this they modify their belief and tell me that it’s necessary to pass GEPT to get into a good university, not a bad one.
As I have language students who are also undergraduates at NTU I still don’t accept this. A while ago I actually paid someone to spend an afternoon calling different departments of the better national universities, and not one said that GEPT was a requirement.
The closest anyone came to supporting the government’s claim was to say that if two candidates were identical in other respects, and there was a shortage of places, then preference would be given to the one with some additional qualification. GEPT would help, and so would IELTS, TOEFL, or a certificate of competence at the piano.
So studying GEPT is of no benefit to the students from the point of view of ‘credentialism’, and of doubtful value educationally.
It’s worth noting that the fee, to the best of my knowledge, is NT$1500 to take the first part of the test which is marked by a computer. Tests are held in university halls, with invigilators, and they also have the expense of sending you a notification of your result. According to the website, 2.7 million students have taken GEPT so far and I’ll leave it to the reader to do the maths on that one. Quite how much the publishers and cram schools make out of teaching something that the high schools are not allowed to know about is another question again.
Alternatives to GEPT
Whatever the criticisms of GEPT, it is fair to say that IELTS and TOEFL are not appropriate for high school kids. There is, however, a whole set of suitable tests known as the Cambridge Main Suite:
Key English Test
Preliminary English Test
First Certificate in English
Certificate in Advanced English
Certificate of Proficiency in English
The KET, PET, and FCE would provide excellent benchmarks for pre-university students and one or two high schools with an emphasis on English do put students through these tests. However they are expensive and there are problems with providing venues for students to take the tests.
The Main Suite is consistent with the CEF, so it’s worth mentioning that now:
The Common European Framework For Language Learning is not a test, and it’s not even specific to English. It’s simply a set of benchmarks for ability to accomplish certain tasks. It’s a European (originally Swiss) initiative designed to standardise definitions so that an “intermediate” level speaker of a language under one system would have the same abilities as someone from a different country who learned the language and was tested under a different system. Or conversely, if you’re at level X in three different languages then you should be able to do the same things in those languages, rather than find that due to different conventions you need to be an advanced user of one language to buy an ice cream, but only an intermediate user of another to negotiate complex business deals.
If you’ve ever taught a class where you were told that the level was “intermediate” only to discover that your employer’s definition of intermediate was different from yours, and different again from Jack C Richards’, then you’ll appreciate the usefulness of the CEF.
The CEF is ‘general’ in nature, whereas IELTS is focused on the needs of universities. So although IELTS is a good indicator, it’s not strictly compatible with the CEF. BULATS is compatible. TOEFL and TOEIC are American, and I haven’t seen any discussion of how they square up, but I would imagine that TOEFL would be in a similar position to IELTS in any case.
Now I’ve got this far, I might as well paste the CEF descriptors in here - and then go to bed!
A1 Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.
A2 Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment). Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters. Can describe in simple terms aspects of his/her background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.
B1 Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.
B2 Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
C1 Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.
C2 Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. Can summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation. Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in more complex situations.
These descriptors can apply to any of the languages spoken in Europe, and there are translations in many languages.
A beautiful post. I learned a great deal from it. Thanks, Loretta.
Great post. Stickifying it.
Government employees can do any one of various English tests approved by the Central Personnel Administration.
The GEPT tried to estblish itself as a monopoly but the Gov’t opened the market in 2005 at the same time as it declared all English tests be aligned with the CEF. My organisation has been developing the Global English Test (GET) since 2004: get.org.tw . The GET is used by many gov’t departments, unis, etc. You can get a lot of info on the CEF from our website. Also materials you can use like CEF self-assessment checklists in English and Chinese. Useful for co-teaching.
This is one of the best posts to any question ever asked in the history of the internet.
How do I recommend it to be on the classic posts page?
Government employees can do any one of various English tests approved by the Central Personnel Administration.
The GEPT tried to estblish itself as a monopoly but the Gov’t opened the market in 2005 at the same time as it declared all English tests be aligned with the CEF. My organisation has been developing the Global English Test (GET) since 2004: get.org.tw . The GET is used by many gov’t departments, unis, etc. You can get a lot of info on the CEF from our website. Also materials you can use like CEF self-assessment checklists in English and Chinese. Useful for co-teaching.[/quote]
Thanks for the information, Mr. Phillips.
[quote=“Puppet”]This is one of the best posts to any question ever asked in the history of the internet.
How do I recommend it to be on the classic posts page?[/quote]
Why? Do teachers not know this stuff?
[quote=“Buttercup”][quote=“Puppet”]This is one of the best posts to any question ever asked in the history of the internet.
How do I recommend it to be on the classic posts page?[/quote]
Why? Do teachers not know this stuff?[/quote]
Nope. Quite honestly, it’s never been anything I have ever had to even consider until recently. Up until now, I’ve had 2 jobs in Taiwan: One in a Montessori school and one at an English school that had its own curriculum and own way of doing things. At the Montessori school, my job was more geared towards teaching children actual English, not preparing them for tests. (That soon changed and became ironic because by teaching the children English, they were already ready for the tests they had to take).
The other school was just a piece of crap and the kids didn’t learn much of anything - including how to take the tests.
So up until now, I have never even had to consider that I might have to “teach to a test.” It’s never been a real issue for me until recently.
It’s never been an issue for me at my job, either, and it’s not an issue now. I’ve become curious about it on my own, because it involves goals.
Well, that pretty much answers my question of where I could find out how to take the GEPT myself. What if I were to say that I am Hispanic background and therefore want to prove to my employers that I am capable of teaching English to non-native speakers? That I am working on my MAT in applied linguistics and my thesis is on the various English tests…
What if I use my Chinese name instead?
In a country where traffic laws are mere suggestions and entrance essays to overseas universities are practically ghostwritten by us laowais, why are they being so anal about who takes the GEPT?
[quote=“ImaniOU”]Well, that pretty much answers my question of where I could find out how to take the GEPT myself. What if I were to say that I am Hispanic background and therefore want to prove to my employers that I am capable of teaching English to non-native speakers? That I am working on my MAT in applied linguistics and my thesis is on the various English tests…
What if I use my Chinese name instead?
In a country where traffic laws are mere suggestions and entrance essays to overseas universities are practically ghostwritten by us laowais, why are they being so anal about who takes the GEPT?[/quote]
They probably don’t have any systems for tracking how different demographics perform and don’t want the stats screwed.
There’s also a fine line between allowing your test (which is a commercial endeavour) to be used in research and leaving it wide open for analysis by the competition.
And they probably don’t want all the foreigner teacher tell the student how poorly question it have.
Are you kidding? Hell, 75% of the reason why I want to take it is to hand it in with the mistakes corrected. 
Yes, but what a loss of face that would be to the people who took the money for developing the test and then came up with that low-rent offal…
Getting back to the tests and standards of English, the CEFR is a global reference for learner achievement in language acquisition, and I think it covers about 8 languages. Each of the levels describes what learners can do in the target language. These “can-do” statements were developed by the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE), which was jointly founded by Cambridge University and the University of Salamanca.
So there’s the standard. What I’m curious about are all the charts which include different types of English test pegged to the CEFR. I don’t have a problem with Cambridge tests being linked to it as Cambridge played a big part in setting out the standards, but what about other tests that were developed according to a different standard?
The TOEIC test is a good example of this. I’m not very sure about the standard that TOEIC was originally designed to follow, but can this standard and the CEFR really be linked together as they were developed quite separately?
Another thing about TOEIC is that I’ve heard that if a TOEIC score is less than 800, it’s not very easy to say for sure what the English ability of candidates actually is. Looking at the charts, that covers a big part of the CEFR.
Google it. There’s an equivalency chart somewhere. CEF is just another ruler.
Got a meeting now, but I can explain TOEIC/TOEFL and Cambridge diffs later on, if you like?
I’m definitely curious about the differences, and yes I know there is an equivalency chart. My point is just that if different tests are developed to meet a standard, then it should be the same standard, and I don’t think TOEIC and Cambridge tests were. Cambridge tests aim at getting candidates to achieve according to the “can-do” statements, but does TOEIC?
Cambridege tests predate the CEFR by a long way and are not designed around ‘can-dos’ (Don’t confuse lp descriptors and ALTE/other candos; they really aren’t the same) . Equivalency is difficult to fundamentally establish because the tests don’t really assess the same competencies, even though they could be said to correspond. There isn’t a huge amount of money to be made by ETS by ‘tagging’ their tests to what is essentially an EU funded initiative.
The connection between ALTE, can-do and Cambridge exams can be found on a PDF file called the ALTE can do project.
[quote][/quote]An assumption was made that Levels A2 and B2 (Waystage and Vantage)
could be taken to correspond to ALTE Levels 1 and 3. These points were
chosen because the ALTE Level 2 exams are explicitly modelled on the
Council of Europe Waystage specification, and Vantage represents that
rather well-understood intermediate level tested in English by the FCE
exam.
The scale and the band cutoffs used in ALTE computer-adaptive testing
projects were used as a working definition of the ALTE levels. The origins of
this scale lie in work done over several years at Cambridge to establish the
relative difficulty of UCLES EFL exams. The difficulty threshold of the
passing grade on each exam (KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE) is taken as a
provisional definition of the ALTE five-level system.[quote][/quote]
And yes, I agree that equivalency is hard to establish, which is why I’m uneasy about grouping all the tests onto an apparently unified chart.
So I’m still curious about what standard TOEIC or TOEFL is based on?
What do you mean by ‘based on’?
It’s a free standing assessment test, as are the Cambridge tests. They all predate the CEF by a long time. TOEIC and TOEFL are based on ETS’ own criteria and descriptors. There’s no underlying connection.