The Possibility of Producing Useful Proficiency Tests in English*

Abstract

To begin at the beginning, proficiency tests, like paper, printing, and gunpowder, were invented by the Chinese. As early as 2200 B.C. the emperor of China was using tests to decide which of his officials should be promoted and which should be fired. A thousand years later the Chan dynasty had developed a series of examinations in which every candidate for public office demonstrated his competence in the five basic arts: music, archery, horsemanship, writing, and arithmetic. Tests for teachers arrived in the Western world with the establishment of the medieval universities. The probationary discourse was the essential step by which a student proved himself fit for membership in the tightly held guild of university professors. Today tests are a normal requirement for admission to the practice of law and medicine, not to mention barbering, the selling of real estate, and the calculation of insurance risks. Both the pervasiveness and the ancient lineage of proficiency tests argue for the possibility that they are producible and for the probability that they are useful.