An Attentive Study On Ethical Issues In Rating The NMET Writing Performance

Ethical issues are very popular among language testers abroad. However, they have long escaped the attention of language researchers in our country. The National Matriculation English Test (NMET) is a large-scale high-stakes test, whose results are used to make important decisions that immediately and directly affect large numbers of people. Therefore, to ensure raters' fairness of its writing part is of great importance. However, research into the rating process of EFL raters in terms of ethics is very sketchy in the context of mainland China. The purpose of the present study is to probe into factors that impair raters' fairness by tracing the NMET rating process in an inland province in 2007, and to examine the impact of the NMET rating on individuals, institutions and the society at large. This study also developed the Code of Ethics and Practice for the NMET raters with the intention of providing guidance on rater training and the NMET rating practice.This thesis gives a review of the relevant literature on testing ethics, consequential validity and impact. It gives an introduction to the state-of-the-art researches on ethical issues in the filed of language testing, where ethical issues are many and complex, but short of empirical studies. Then the thesis offers a succinct review and discussion about the previous studies on the NMET and scoring of writing performance, points out their limitations, and illuminates the perspective of the present study, that is, incorporating ethical concerns into the NMET rating practice.The present study was carried out with a combination of qualitative data and descriptive statistics. Data analysis involved coding, recording and decoding of the responses from six questionnaires and one log, and descriptive statistics were adopted to show the results of data analysis. Before the 2007 NMET, three questionnaires were used to investigate opinions of the NMET rating among the candidates, and their parents and teachers, and the impact of the NMET rating on education systems—the washback effect is of particular concern in this study—and society. With reference to the results from the questionnaire data and the relevant codes and rules, the present study proposed the Code of Ethics and Practice for the NMET Raters and had it announced in the NMET rater training session and posted at the entrance to the rating location to catch the attention of raters. In the nine days of the NMET rating, 8 essay raters were invited to write logs on a daily basis for the purpose of examining changes of the influence of various factors on their rating behaviors. After rating, 50 raters were randomly selected from an entire pool of 157 essay raters to fill out a questionnaire and to examine the degree to which various factors affected their rating behaviors and how raters of different ages were affected. The rater questionnaire data were used as a cross check on the validity of the findings from the log data. After the test results were announced, two questionnaires were used to investigate evaluation of this year's NMET ratings among the candidates and their parents and the impact of the NMET rating on individuals and the society at large.The results from the surveys indicate that raters were easily affected by sense of responsibility and awareness of ethics, handwriting and tidiness, and labor intensity. This finding accounts for the reason why tidiness was overemphasized in instruction on the NMET writing strategies. Despite all the influential factors, the results from the post-exam questionnaire data show that the majority of the stakeholders expressed their satisfaction with the test results and raters' fairness though a few doubts remained. Thus, the NMET rating generally ensured the fulfillment of the NMET's role as a selection tool. But still, there is much scope for improvement.