Internationalising Higher Education

When recruiting international students, institutions have to rely on tests and exams as evidence of students' ability and suitability. Large groups of potentially suitable students can be excluded if a test is not fair or is biased against students from certain backgrounds. Fairness and lack of bias are particularly important for English language tests. This session looks at how to ensure fairness in English language tests and discusses the
importance and significance of cultural perspectives, topic and topicality, varieties of English and ranges of accents. It will draw on research, validity and reliability studies, and show examples from the IELTS question paper production process