What Are We Really Testing?

The girl at the door who missed the word list led my mind to many questions. What was she being examined for? A word list? She was a student of the English Language Skills Department. What skills would a word list teach her?

The language skills departments usually have a list of learning outcomes that emphasise skills. By the end of the course, students will be able to read and understand unfamiliar texts, write following the given prompts, speak on a given topic. Nowhere do you see a word list.

Yet despite these clearly stated outcomes, word lists find their way into exams. You cannot learn a language by memorising the meaning or spelling of words. You have to first listen and read the language, write it and most importantly, express yourself in it. Word lists cannot teach any of this.

So how does this happen? Assessment doesn’t change overnight. It shifts gradually, quietly, in response to pressures that have nothing to do with learning. A program grows. Numbers increase. Complaints arrive. And somewhere along the way, the careful alignment between outcomes and assessment loosens. What remains is something easier to administer, easier to mark, easier to defend. A word list.

The result is assessment that operates at the wrong cognitive level entirely. Looking into Bloom’s taxonomy, remembering and recalling sit at the lowest level of cognitive skills. Yet many of our assessments, word lists, multiple choice questions, matching exercises, operate precisely at this level. We need learners to read and infer, to compose and write, to think critically. These are higher order skills. Mechanical tests cannot build them and cannot meaningfully measure them.

This is not unique to language education. Across disciplines, assessment has drifted from measuring understanding to measuring what is easiest to test.

What would fair assessments look like? One that asks students to read an unfamiliar text and infer meaning. To construct an argument. To write coherently in response to a real prompt. To demonstrate not what they memorised, but what they can actually do with language.

The girl at the door that evening taught me something crucial: that administering the system has become more important than learning and creating. As conscientious as I found her, she could probably be a successful writer, a public speaker who inspired the youth, but at that moment, she was stuck in a word list, the list that would lose its value the moment the exam was over.