Quality Assurance
Quality throughout
Assuring the quality of an examination throughout the testing process is a top telc priority. Every team plays an integral part in maintaining telc’s high quality standards.
Validity and reliability
The Test Development team ensures that all examinations are both valid and reliable:
- An examination is valid when it tests exactly what it should: the communicative competence of the candidates in a variety of situations – in private life, out and about, at work and at school or university.
- An examination is reliable when candidates with comparable language abilities achieve similar test results. Personal factors such as gender, religion, nationality and ethnic background should have no influence on the outcome of an examination.
Objectivity
- telc ensures that the examination regulations and administration procedures are upheld in all examinations. This safeguards objectivity when the exams are administered.
- Automated scoring of the candidates’ answers in the listening and reading subtests guarantees complete neutrality.
- telc examiners and raters attend workshops regularly to assure that candidates’ oral and written performance are rated consistently and objectively according to telc’s rating criteria.
- The telc rating criteria, as well as their consistent application, are regularly evaluated during benchmarking, standard setting and calibration sessions.
External Quality Control
telc has been a regular member of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) since 1995. The ALTE standards of excellence are applied to every telc examination. Throughout their development, every test phase is calibrated and monitored according to these demanding criteria.
What is ALTE?
ALTE is an association of language test providers from over 20 European countries, including Cambridge ESOL, the universities of Salamanca and Perugia, the Centre international d’études pédagogiques and the Goethe Institute.
What does ALTE do?
ALTE’s principal task is to maintain the high standard of language tests. For this purpose, ALTE has developed a discerning system of criteria for language test providers to verify the quality of their examinations. According to ALTE standards, each of the following phases of examination development is of equal importance:
- Test Construction
- Administration & Logistics
- Marking & Grading
- Test Analysis
- Communication with Stakeholders
Through regularly conducted evaluations, ALTE ascertains the quality of the examinations provided by their members.
