Making sure that a new exam is a thorough and fair test is a complicated and multi-faceted process, requiring careful research, checking and trial. Some of the world’s leading experts in language assessment contribute to our work of our exams is built on their combined expertise.
New exams have to go through a rigorous series of processes including:
- commissioning the exam – where the scope and time frame for the new exam is decided
- pre-editing – checking that the material written by the exam question writers meets the specification
- editing – ensuring the quality and accuracy of the test content
- pretesting/trialling – trying out the test content to ensure that it tests candidates in the way expected
- pretest/trial review – checking the results of the pretesting and trials to see if further editing is needed
- test construction – test content is assembled into test versions and checked to ensure the level and focus are correct and test security is maintained
- overview – a final critical review of the whole process before the test specification is finalised and more test content produced.
Our quality management system is certificated to the ISO 9001:2015 standard.
We only launch a new exam when we are completely satisfied that the test has passed all of these stages.
Ensuring fair and reliable exams with pretesting
Our goal is to make every examination fair, accurate and focused on assessing language ability. To achieve this, we rely on detailed statistical data to design exams that are consistent in difficulty and content, ensuring fairness for every candidate.
Before any question is included in a live exam, it undergoes pretesting with groups of students who reflect the same first language profiles, age ranges, and backgrounds as live exam candidates. Each pretest involves a minimum of 100 candidates. Pretests are available in both digital and paper-based formats.
Why pretesting matters
Pretesting benefits learners and schools by:
- Allowing learners to practise with real exam questions under exam conditions, building confidence and familiarity with the format.
- Providing results that help learners and teachers identify areas for improvement and readiness for the live exam.
- Being completely free of charge.
Digital pretesting offers all the same benefits as paper-based pretesting, with added speed and efficiency.
How pretesting works
Pretests are, in most cases, designed to mirror the structure and content of the live exam as closely as possible.
They are taken under secure conditions and marked by the same team of markers and examiners who assess the live exams.
Statistical analyses and feedback from the exam centres help us ensure that the questions and tasks are at the right level for the relevant exam. We can also see how successfully each question discriminates between candidates of differing levels.
Based on this review, questions may be:
- Accepted and added to the live exam bank.
- Amended or rewritten for future pretesting.
- Rejected if unsuitable.
Get involved with pretesting
If you would like to take part in pretesting, contact your exam centre or send an enquiry to pretesting@cambridgeenglish.org.
Discover detailed information and support for centres who offer pretesting
For a test to be fair and accurate, everyone who takes it has to have the same opportunity to succeed.
To guarantee our tests are fair, we have a number of important security measures in place to ensure that exams safely distributed to the thousands of exam centres around the world where our tests take place.
Exam papers are delivered to test centres by a number of secure methods – many are accessed via computer in the test centre, some receive physical question papers by secure post, and in some countries they are sent to a courier for delivery only on the day of the test.
Physical question papers may need to be stored for brief periods of time before the exam, as do the completed exam scripts before they are marked. All exam centres are required to have secure storage facilities and are inspected regularly to ensure they meet our strict criteria for security.
Quality is a process which begins with the research and design of tests and ends with an accurate assessment of each candidate’s entry.
The assessment of a candidate’s work has to be as consistent and reliable as every other aspect of the examination process. For this reason all of our exams (except IELTS) are marked by trained and certified Cambridge examiners on Cambridge systems and platforms.
When we receive the completed written papers they are randomly allocated for marking – this ensures that, regardless of where they have come from, all papers are marked fairly.
The examiners who mark the tests are themselves subject to strict monitoring of their performance to ensure that their marking is accurate and consistent.
Speaking tests (with the exception of IELTS) use two assessors to ensure accuracy. We record and sample Speaking tests for subsequent monitoring.
Some of our computer-based tests, such as Linguaskill, are able to give an instant assessment, which is of great value to those who are testing large numbers of people for educational or recruitment purposes.
It is essential to the quality of our exams, the accuracy and fairness of results and the continued reputation of Cambridge each candidate experiences a test that consistently meets the high standards we set.
To achieve this, we have dedicated research teams. The work they do in validating our exams – ensuring their quality, fairness and relevance – is vital.
We work closely with leading specialists in the following disciplines:
- testing and assessment
- statistical analysis and item-banking
- applied linguistics
- corpus linguistics
- language learning/pedagogy.
Together they carry out a variety of research activity for all of our exams.
We regularly give presentations to conferences, submit papers to leading academic journals, and also publish research findings in our own publications: