there are some local business people who take the exam and then sell their experience and answers as “test preparation courses”. I think they were trying to discourage you from this sort of testing procedures. Testing is a big business in Taiwan and makes a lot of people rich.
If you want to get experience with the tests, a better way is to see if you can join the teams who do the grading or monitoring. I’m not sure how this works with the GEPT, but when the TOEFL was tested in huge groups, they would hire teachers to monitor the classrooms. I did this once or twice and decided that was enough experience with organized testing and I would have nothing to do with it ever again.
If you really want to help your friends and students with test preparation, just help them with their listening and get them to read more on their own.
I’m not too surprised that they wouldn’t let you take it. In the US, I believe all of the big tests like SAT, GMAT and GRE require candidates to sign a statement saying that they are only taking the test for the purpose of using it to apply for degree programs. While it is difficult to weed out professional test takers from these exams, such people are still breaking the promise they made when they registered for the exam if they go on to use their testing experience to write prep materials or to teach prep courses.
Stateside anyone can take the SAT (especially middle schoolers trying to get into gifted programs), but they’re on the lookout for proxies. Never seen that kind of cheating myself, but I hear it exists.
Recommendation: Stores like PageOne have huge sections for English language learning. They should have some books there that have old GEPT exams and GEPT test prep exams modeled after the original test. Warning: the actual exams WILL be riddled with mistakes any English-speaking proofreader would catch.
GEPT test forms are not available in Page One I don’t think. There are one or two test forms only for each level, released exclusively by LTTC.
The actual exams are written by native English speakers and proofread by other native English speakers. They are not riddled with mistakes.
Not test forms, tests. As in old ones that students have taken in previous years. The government releases them to educational publishers to then put in books with explanations of the tests. Not very different from books that Kaplan and Princeton Review put out in the States.
My company is one of those publishers that reprints GEPT and JCEE tests. We’re not allowed to alter them when we reprint them–only explain them and point out mistakes in the margin. And there are lots of them, which both the Chinese-speaking and English-speaking editors find on a regular basis. We have one such book going to print within the next week, so I do know they’re out there.
I thought our books were carried in PageOne, but I could be mistaken. They might only be available in Chinese bookstores, but since PageOne carries our magazines, I thought the same would be true for our textbooks. Even if not, I’d find it hard to believe that we don’t have competition that also reprints old GEPTs.
Anyway to the OP, I hope this proves useful to you. If you can’t find any such books around, let me know and I can find out where you can obtain a copy of one of ours.
Oh well, I’m posting by proxy for another user who’s not allowed to “out” himself on here, but he knows what he’s talking about. I’m sure he’ll read this and comment (through me).
[quote=“sandman”]
The actual exams are written by native English speakers and proofread by other native English speakers. They are not riddled with mistakes.[/quote]
English speakers or not, I’ve seen them and they do contain a rather large number of errors. I’m sorry if that hurts their egos.
That’s one very important reason. We experienced the same problem in my testing organisation when a school wanted its native speaking teachers to take our test.
There are ethical considerations too. We are allowed to tell non-native speakers that they are not proficient but we are not allowed to tell native speakers they are not proficient.
[quote=“Chris”]Native speakers formally taking this exam would screw up the scoring curve, which would be unfair to the non-native speakers it’s designed to test.
You could always get yourself a copy of the practice test materials.[/quote]
Agreed, native speakers would mess with the overall results, but what reason do they have to think he/she is a native speaker? The original poster simply said they were American. I talked with a Taiwanese just yesterday who spoke English like a native speaker, and we all know there are plenty of Americans who can’t speak a lick of English, so I’m confused by this also, but not surprised.
