A year ago, the Educational Testing Service decided to publish, in the practice booklet sent out to all students planning to take College Board tests, the names of the members of the various committees of examiners. Up to then our identity had been a fairly well guarded secret, since our names appeared only in the annual reports, sent to headmasters and other administrators whose interest in the tests, though genuine, was somewhat generalized. But with the publication of the names of the committee members, and of my name as chairman of the Spanish committee, I have begun to receive from secondary-school teachers a steady trickle of letters that express bewilderment, skepticism, and even indignation about the Spanish Reading Test. Why doesn't the College Board sell copies of old tests, as it used to? Where do you get such hard words? They are not in any of the textbooks we use. Why don't you add at least one question to the test that will give the student,a chance to show that he can write Spanish? test seems to me nothing but a guessing game, and a moderately bright student ought to do well even if he knows no Spanish at all. I have answered these and other questions, but not as fully or as philosophically as I should have liked, and I hope that this article may be accepted by my correspondents and by other interested teachers as a permissible extension of remarks, for which there is Congressional precedent. I have been connected with the College Board Spanish tests as reader or examiner since 1940, which carries me back, to the 'good old days' of the three-hour June examination and the gathering of readers-all three of us--in New York. Before that I had spent fifteen years preparing pupils for Board examinations, so that my knowledge of and interest in them is reasonably extensive. I confess that the success of my students with the new test is not so uniform as in the old days, a testimonial not only to my honesty but also to the increased effectiveness of the new test in separating the sheep from the goats. I used to have such success with the goats, and it was fun to triumph over nature and the Spanish examiners by winning a 60 for a student who knew shockingly little about the Spanish language-but it wasn't really education, and the goats were not, despite the temporary magic of a College Board passing grade, converted into acceptable Spanish students when they reached college. One of the doubts implicit in the letters I have been receiving is about the possibility of testing a student thoroughly by means of a one-hour objective test where all they have to do is write the numbers 1 to 5, as compared with the old threehour test. What was the old test like? It was originally almost entirely translation-from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish--plus an original composition, more or less controlled, for the advanced students. About 1935, reading passages with comprehension questions were introduced, then 'fill-in' exercises, and still later, multiple-choice vocabulary tests--the entering wedge. The new test is entirely multiplechoice: 140 questions to answer in an hour. Teachers whose students take College Board tests have probably seen a sample of the various types of questions: vocabulary, questions on syntax or usage, tested by an English sentence or phrase with four Spanish translations, and read-