Language placement tests are extremely useful to anyone who is attempting to acquire a second language. Placement tests help to ensure that students select study materials that are best suited to their level of ability. Selecting the proper study materials is the first step to ensuring an enjoyable experience for the student.

Language assessment is a field of study within the study of applied linguistics. Its main focus is the assessment of language in the school, or university context. The assessment may include listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Both language knowledge and language proficiency are considered during assessment.

Quick and convenient, our online Spanish placement test can be taken anytime, anywhere. In only 15 minutes or less, the student will receive individual section scores and a recommended placement level. You can rest easy knowing that our language assessment test has been validated by top universities.

Before we began working on our new online Spanish placement test, we established a clear objective to develop a test which would evaluate students quickly, easily, and, most importantly, accurately. Our test goes beyond other Spanish placement tests by measuring knowledge of written Spanish, spoken Spanish, Spanish reading comprehension, and Spanish grammar.

The first step in developing a new Spanish placement test was determining what kind of new test was needed to ensure that students would be assigned at the appropriate level. A series of meetings between our Testing Committee and the university faculty identified areas where the previous placement tests did not accurately reflect the student's abilities. The next step was to create a test panel of university faculty. Members of the test panel were chosen based upon their experience in teaching Spanish.

Once a test panel was formed the first task was to formulate the overall specifications for each level of Spanish fluency. This task required the panel members to determine what students absolutely need to know. The panel then decided that Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) would be the most effective approach to utilize.

CAT is a form of computer-based test that instantly adapts to the student’s ability level. The first question of the test is selected randomly, the computer selects the following question based upon the correctness of the answer given to the previous question. CAT selects questions with the objective of maximizing the precision of the exam based on what is known about the student from previous responses. From the student's perspective, the difficulty of the exam is perfectly tailored to their level of ability. For example, if a student responds correctly to a question of intermediate difficulty, they will then be presented with a more difficult question. Or, if they responded incorrectly, they would be presented with a simpler question. When compared to typical static multiple choice tests, with a fixed set of items administered to all students, computer-adaptive tests require fewer questions to arrive at equally accurate scores.

It is difficult to overstate the advantages of adaptive testing. The level of difficulty of each question adjusts to the level demonstrated by the student which allows the test to consistently challenge the student without overwhelming the student with extremely difficult questions. By the same token, the test will never bore the student with easy questions. With an adaptive test, each student will take a unique path through the test - making cheating much more difficult. Because the adaptive algorithm focuses in on the actual level of the student quickly, it is able to deliver more questions across a wide range of levels that are at or close to the student’s skill. This results in a more accurate final score while requiring less time than a fixed form test.