On The Study Of The Quality Of Test Development In College Entrance Examinations -with Special Reference To The Perspective Of Client Satisfaction

The College Entrance Examination, being a high-stake testing system, is undoubtedly of great importance. However, the recent years have heard constant critical voices toward the quality of the test papers, which strongly challenges the creditability of the examination itself. To guarantee the quality of the College Entrance Examination (CEE) papers, the issue of establishing a evaluation system should be firstly addressed. To put it another way, we have to be clear that who, how and what to evaluate in this system. As a kind of educational service, the quality of the CEE papers should be evaluated by those who use the service. But the present evaluation, which mainly takes the form of data analysis report done by the testing authorities themselves, is nothing but an internal one. Due to its lack of the evaluation from the people for whom it’s intended, this kind of evaluation is partial and difficult to avoid the criticism of the public.Starting from the clarification of the concept that the College Entrance Examination is a form of educational service, this dissertation makes a study of the quality evaluation system for the CEE papers by using the approach from the service quality evaluation system. With the introduction of the theory of clients’satisfaction, the author analyzes the people who accept this kind of service, namely, the examinees, the universities or colleges and the high schools. In view of the fact that the universities and colleges only play the role of using the testing results, instead of providing their specific requirements on the examination papers or participating in the tests development process within the existing mechanism, this dissertation will only takes into account the examinees and the high schools as its service objects to evaluate the quality of the CEE papers.Based on the review of the existing literature and the practices home and abroad, the present author proposes his framework of evaluating the quality of the CEE papers from the perspective of gaining the satisfaction of its clients. Using the system analysis approach, the paper analyzes the unique concept embodied in this evaluation framework, i. e. service, cooperation and being appropriate and illustrates its rationale. Then drawing on the theory of clients’satisfaction and the traditional theory of testing validity, the paper elaborates the theoretical foundation of this framework and shows its working mechanism as well as its values.Considering the difference between high school teachers and the examinees in perceiving the quality of the CEE papers, this thesis designs different projects following the illustration of the proposed framework. For the high school teachers, a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is constructed and the Partial Least Square (PLS) approach is adopted in order to fit it. For the evaluation from the examinees, a scale for the structural survey is formulated with the methods of system analysis and componential analysis. In order to validate the above designs, three empirical studies are conducted. First the Test Specifications and the Statistical Reports of the CEE Papers are used to fit and validate the SEM of high school teachers’evaluation, which indicates that the SEM functions well. Then the validation process of the data from the survey of the examinee’s feelings toward the papers shows that the scale also works well. Moreover, these studies produce the clients’evaluation of the CEE papers, which fills the blank in the previous evaluation model. With the analysis of the clients’evaluation, the thesis concludes itself by putting forward some related strategies and solutions.