They’re secretly experimenting on us!

It seems that many new students and new teaching staff find unibz’s trilingual language model confusing. Do you think this is the case?
Well, the entrance and exit language requirements are clear enough to most members of the University community, but the several different types of language courses and tests a student encounters at unibz and the role each plays in learning languages and meeting the graduation requirements is not as intuitive.
For instance, students frequently ask questions such as: “I passed the C1 exam at the Language Centre; why can I not pass my B2 course in the Faculty of Economics and Management?” Or: “I passed a C1 end-of-course test at the Language Centre; why do I still have to certify B2 by taking another exam?”.

So you think the confusion is because unibz has too many types of language courses and exams?
Not at all. Contrary to popular belief, unibz is not the setting of a Franz Kafka novella about the absurdity of learning languages during the age of the Common European Framework of References, where the only reward for passing a “language test” today is permission to take a much more difficult “language exam” tomorrow in the perpetual pursuit of the elusive “C2”. Each language course and each language test in fact serves a distinct purpose within the University’s language model, and the model as a whole has the best interest of students in mind. The confusion is two-fold. First, in language assessment there is no universal distinction between the words “exam” and “test”, other than that the word “exam” sounds more “official” or “bigger”, but here at unibz we use these words to refer to different experiences. Second, there are many different types of language “tests” or “exams”. In fact, most students will encounter at least four types during their academic careers at unibz: placement tests, diagnostic tests, achievement tests, and proficiency exams.

Do you think that part of the problem is that language teachers and students experience tests from different perspectives?
Absolutely. From the perspective of students, the purpose of any language test is simply to “pass the test”. But from the perspective of language teachers and language examiners, a language test is essentially a field experiment. The goal of the experiment is to elicit a sample of a student’s language knowledge and/or language skills in order to answer a specific research question. The research question the examiner is asking determines both the purpose and the design of the test.

Could you elaborate?
Sure. If I wanted to know the average height of Italian women from South Tyrol, I would likely not have the time and resources to measure the height of every single woman living in South Tyrol. I would have to take a “representative sample”, for example 30 randomly selected women. I would also need instruments and units of measurement, procedures for data collection, and methods for data analysis. For instance, I could physically measure the height of each “participant” using a metric tape measure and then record this data in Microsoft Excel in order to perform statistical analyses. In the case of a language test, the object of study is the language knowledge and skills of students. The teacher cannot test the students on every aspect of the language, so he or she has to choose a representative sample of the language to include on the test. The instrument for data collection is the test itself. The procedures are the way in which the exam is administered. The units of measurement are the assessment criteria and grading rubrics. And the method of data analysis is likewise to enter the scores into a spreadsheet in order to perform statistical analyses to ensure that the results are reliable and valid. What varies from one type of language exam to the next is simply the research question.

So, what is the research question in a placement test?
In which language course should this student enroll? The purpose is simply to “place” a student in a particular course based upon some standard measure of the student’s pre-existing language competency, usually based on a scale of possible scores. For the sake of efficiency, a good placement test requires no more than 20 or 30 minutes to complete and will therefore typically only test a student’s knowledge of a small sample of the grammar and vocabulary taught across all language courses offered within a language curriculum. The goal is not to discover how much a student has learned, to-date, or how much a student knows, per se, but to place the student with peers who have very similar scores and presumably similar competencies in the language. This is why you cannot “fail” a placement test.