Become A Pretesting Partner And Shape The Future Of Assessment!

Have you ever wanted to give your students stress-free practice taking online assessments, without the pressure of taking a real exam? Or have you ever dreamed of finding out where students need more practice, without having to spend hours marking their tests? Our Pretesting Research Partners work with us to trial our exam questions before they become part of our live tests – helping us to shape the future of English language assessment. And it’s completely free!

What is pretesting?

Pretesting is a fundamental step in the development of our assessment products, such as the Oxford Placement Test and Oxford Test of English. It is a free research activity we conduct with students around the world. We offer pretests to students of various age groups and at various CEFR levels. We pretest all four skills: Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing.

4 good reasons to apply:

1. Stress-free practice – Give students practice taking online assessments without the pressure of taking a real exam.
2. Fast results – Results are provided instantly for Reading and Listening. Writing and Speaking are marked by trained assessors, so a breakdown of scores is provided within 3 weeks. It’s an efficient way to identify which skills each of your students should focus on. Also, it will give you strong evidence to motivate students to practice specific skills. Please note, because this is a research activity, the results cannot be used to place students at a particular CEFR level, or as proof of proficiency.
3. Total flexibility – Choose when you want to pretest and how often – from every month to once a year, we require no commitment. You can just try it once and see if that works for you!
4. Be part of something bigger – Contribute to the future of English language assessment as part of our global research community.

Where are our current Partners?

As you can see on our map, our current partners are based across the globe – and we’re always looking to expand our reach!

How does pretesting work?

Pretesting is easy to get involved in and we support you throughout the whole process. Each month, we (the pretesting team) let our Partners know what CEFR level pretests we have available. Partners confirm the number of students they would like to pretest with, and we assign them the licences. Licences are valid for a month and can be used at any time, which allows our Partners to run a pretest session when it best suits their schedule. Partners run their sessions via the OUP Learning Management System and provide some feedback to the pretesting team when the sessions are completed.

What about the results?

The Reading and Listening skills are marked automatically and the results are available as soon as a session is completed. The results come in the form of a score that is converted to a percentage of correct answers.

The Writing and Speaking skills are marked by external assessors and scored across 4 criteria:

• Writing: Organization, Task Fulfilment, Grammar and Lexis.
• Speaking: Task Fulfilment, Fluency/ Pronunciation, Grammar and Lexis.

Requirements

For the full requirements to become a Pretesting Research Partner, please see page 6 of the Pretesting Research Partner Handbook.

Interested? Apply now!

Feel free to email the pretesting team at [email protected] if you have any questions. We are always happy to help!