1. Background

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the English Placement Test (EPT) is the institutional placement test that is used to place students into appropriate English as a second language (ESL) writing and/or pronunciation service courses. The EPT is used to assess the English ability of newly admitted international undergraduate and graduate students as validated against the English language demands of our campus (UIUC English Placement Test 2013). According to Davidson & Cho (Reference Davidson, Cho, Peacock and Flowerdew2001), the current format of the EPT has maintained its quality and displayed evidence of validity through the use of detailed test specifications that align with the goals of the UIUC ESL writing and pronunciation service courses. UIUC offers these courses to international students who are accepted on a limited status based on their scores on standardized English proficiency tests (TOEFL or IELTS) and/or other relevant information in each student's admission dossier. Students accepted on limited admission status are required to take the EPT before start of instruction.

2. The English Placement Test at UIUC

Academic English testing at UIUC dates back to 1907, but the EPT was started in 1950 when Lado and Fries's tests from Michigan were used in the ESL program as a placement tool (Davidson & Cho Reference Davidson, Cho, Peacock and Flowerdew2001). The first institutional placement test designed solely for the purpose of placement in the UIUC ESL courses was developed in the 1950s. This was the first era of the EPT in which the test was developed based on the then-dominant structuralist model of language. Lado and Fries's tests assessed discrete structural and lexical linguistic knowledge (Davidson & Cho Reference Davidson, Cho, Peacock and Flowerdew2001). The EPT from the first era included a multiple-choice grammar test and a timed essay test. The essay section of the EPT was graded primarily on grammar and organization of written content. The second era of the EPT began in the late 1970s when the main paradigm of language teaching was grounded in communicative competence. This was also when psychometric features of the test were emphasized. The essay test from the first era was replaced with cloze and diction tasks. In the third and current era, the essay exam was reintroduced to the EPT, and test specifications, a set of blueprints for item development and test control (Davidson & Lynch Reference Davidson and Lynch2002), were developed to maintain the consistency of items and tasks.

The current operational version of the On-campus EPT – the Semi-Enhanced EPT – has two sections: a written exam and an oral interview. The written exam requires test-takers to produce an academic essay based on the information obtained from a reading passage and a short lecture. This integrated writing test was developed in light of Cho (Reference Cho2001), where test-takers were asked to follow a series of activities in a process-oriented writing assessment. She proposed that including pre-writing and revision tasks can benefit ESL writers.

In the oral interview section of the EPT, test-takers are interviewed individually to assess their pronunciation abilities. The interview consists of two parts: Phase I and Phase II. Phase I of the interview is an initial global interview and is conducted by a single rater. The rater determines whether the test-taker has any communication deficiencies resulting from unintelligible pronunciation. If the test-taker does not display any pronunciation difficulty and the rater can understand all of the test-taker's speech without trying to guess the meaning from context, then they are exempted from oral pronunciation instruction. If the test-taker, however, demonstrates a great deal of difficulty in producing intelligible words or the rater cannot understand any part of the test-taker's speech, the oral test continues to Phase II. In Phase II, test-takers are asked to read sentences from the interview packet while the rater evaluates whether the test-taker pronounces the target sounds accurately. Based on a test-taker's performance on Phase II, an interview score is assigned.

3. The Online English Placement Test

The Semi-Enhanced (On-campus) EPT is a half-day test, conducted during the week before the start of instruction for each semester. In the fall semester of 2008, there was a sharp increase in the number of international undergraduate students at UIUC. This surge led to an increase in the number of EPT test-takers. Prior to 2008, undergraduate EPT test-takers constituted approximately 22% (97 out of 448) of the total EPT test-takers. In 2008 undergraduate EPT test-takers increased to approximately 43% (342 out of 798) of the total number.

This, in turn, led to a series of changes to the English Placement Test. The most substantial change was the development and inclusion of the Online English Placement Test. The Online EPT was launched, for the incoming undergraduate international students, in the fall of 2012. The mandate, or the ‘combination of forces which help to decide what will be tested and to shape the actual content of the test’ (Davidson & Lynch Reference Davidson and Lynch2002: 77), behind the development of the Online EPT was the demand of undergraduate advisors who needed to obtain their advisees’ EPT results early to facilitate online advising sessions in June and July prior to students’ arrival in August. The Online EPT for fall 2012 was offered only to undergraduates. The decision behind this is due to the writing course placement differences for undergraduate and graduate students. For the former, the completion of the ESL writing course sequence (ESL 113, 114 and 115) fulfills the Composition 1 requirement – meaning that no undergraduate can receive an EPT placement of ‘exemption’ from writing instruction. Even if an undergraduate student is misplaced and achieves the highest level in writing, they must take one ESL writing course, ESL 115, to fulfill the Composition 1 requirement. In short, an undergraduate student will receive at least one semester of ESL instruction even in the case of misplacement. For graduate students, their EPT scores could exempt them from all ESL writing courses. On achievement of the highest level (or level 4) in writing, they will receive a placement of ‘exemption’ from ESL writing course requirements. This means that there is no way to provide mandatory English language services in cases of misplacement other than elective ESL courses, which some students choose to take.

In fall 2012, the EPT team tested 236 undergraduate students through the Online EPT. This is approximately 57% (236 out of 417 undergraduate test-takers) of the undergraduate students that took the Online and On-campus EPT in fall 2012. The online test is delivered via Moodle during regular timeframes called ‘test windows’ in which the test is up and running. To accommodate the needs of students from various time-zones, test windows are a 48-hour period during which test-takers can complete their EPT. During the test window, students must complete both the written exam and Phase I of the interview. The decision to include only Phase I was primarily motivated by two factors. First, there is currently no viable means through which test content can be released to online test-takers in a secure manner. Secondly, based on test-taker data from fall 2011 On-campus EPTs, approximately 72% of test-takers who take the Oral EPT Phase I are not required to take Phase II. Because of the small percentage of test-takers who move on to Phase II and even smaller percentage (5%) of test-takers who are required to take ESL 110/510 after taking Phase II, it is expected that conducting the Oral EPT Phase II only on campus will not affect course selection and registration for most test-takers.

The second notable change to the EPT was the score reporting procedure. Prior to fall 2008, the results of the EPT did not affect many undergraduate test-takers; hence, scores were only reported to the test-takers and were not delivered to undergraduate advisors. It was up to the test-takers to inform their advisors of their EPT results. However, the increase in the number of test-takers meant that the delivery of these results had to be more effective because they had to be delivered to more test score users, and more efficiently so that they could be reported in a timely manner. Therefore, the reporting of EPT scores for undergraduate test-takers has become more systematic. In the current On-campus and Online EPT, essays and interviews are rated and score reports are generated at the end of each test day. Afterwards, the EPT scores are sent to a support unit at UIUC that uploads the scores to a central UIUC score display system that undergraduate advisors can access. The upload takes approximately two business days after each batch of scores is sent. Due to the delay in score reporting to undergraduate advisors and students, score reports are also sent to a representative advisor in undergraduate colleges with large numbers of international students. This allows for timely and accurate advising.

4. Future research agenda