A Study Of Reliability And Validity Of An Achievement Test Developed By Item Bank Of New Horizon College English Online System

The test usefulness of achievement tests in colleges and universities is usuallyignored by people. Based on Bachman’s theory of test usefulness, the study conductedaims to evaluate the reliability and validity of a final exam test developed by the NewHorizon College English (NHCE for short) item bank of NHCE online system integratedwith NHCE textbooks to check whether learners meet the requirements of language abilityat a certain level required by course standards and College English CurriculumRequirements2007(Requirements2007for short), which are abilities of listening, reading,translation, writing and using English in a well-rounded way.The research questions of this study are:1. What is the reliability quality of theNHCE test?2. What is the validity quality of the NHCE test? To answer these tworesearch questions, a test is given to117learners as subject of this study to collect bothindividual scores and global scores of subjects. Both statistics from quantitative datacalculated by SPSS and interview conducted are collected to support the study: the normaldistribution statistics, the reliability Cronbach Alpha, the correlation and factor analysisstatistics for quantitative data as well as interview answers for qualitative data.The results of the study show that the NHCE test is reliable and valid in measuringthe test takers’ language ability at a certain level indicated by the Requirements and thecourse standards of the study school. Meanwhile, teachers can briefly get the inferenceabout test takers’ language ability based on test performance. However, it fails to measurethe reading ability as such testing items are too easy. Furthermore, the blank filling itemsare poorly designed and are too difficult for more than half of all test takers. It is stronglysuggested that a trial test should be given to a small number of participants first in order toensure the reliability and validity of the test, in addition, the quality of items for readingcomprehension in NHCE item bank Level2should be carefully checked and the publisherhas the responsibility of evaluating the quality of its products.