A Meta-evaluation On The Studies To TEM8

Test for English Majors (TEM) is a high-risk test which is held national wide for college English majors. The purpose of this test is to evaluate the English majors'ability to use English and their mastery of the language skills and knowledge, check the implementation of the English Teaching Syllabus for English Majors in College and bring positive washback to English teaching and learning. As the only set of national tests for English majors in China, it has received more and more attention. Not only the number of candidates has increased a lot, but the researches about it have also increased. Against this background, this paper introduces the concept of meta-evaluation to summarize and evaluate the present studies about TEM8 and in the hope of providing feedback to help perfect TEM8.This paper has two purposes. As a summative meta-evaluation, the main purpose is to summarize the findings concluded from the present studies. Since Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is regarded as the general principal in the education and psychology field, this paper summarizes the findings in five dimensions in terms of the division of validity evidences in the Standards. The second purpose is to do a meta-evaluation on research methods adopted in TEM8 studies.This paper finds that TEM8 reaches a high validity in general. Most of the tasks are integrative and authentic. TEM8 has positive washback towards English teaching and is well accepted by both students and teachers. Different methods have been applied in the studies on TEM8, among which qualitative analysis is used more. But compared to other tests, such as CET and IELTS, the difficulty of TEM8 is less stable. Moreover, many studies on TEM8 are about the answering techniques rather than the cognitive processes of candidates.