Technical b r Report - International Military Testing Association

ut rcoding comprehension item leads arc printed in the test booklet. After
completion; the tests wcrc field tcstcd, including a validation !measurc, with
Army ~~JCS~~~I?IKFI possessing varying c?cgrecs of skill and experience in the two
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languages. The validnt ion instrument consisted of job-oriented F tasks such
as intcrprcling and translating.
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The median correlation between the Chinese
test and tltc crilcrion mcnsi~rf VdS -70 and hctwcen the Russian test and tllc
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criterion c~ensur~ .7s;. The K-R 20 rclinbiliLy of the Chinese test was .96
a n d the Russia11 t.c:,t .95.
Language specialists at The Army Language School wcrc furnish4 English
translatihlls of the two prototype tests mentioned previously and t;crc then
instructed to use these translations, item by item, i.o’drvLJoping the new
tests. Since the cordi Lions for dcvinting fro:3 the givrn translations were
few and rathrr rigid, Lhc resultant new Lcsts WC:rc essrI?nti.nlly parallel in
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many ways: to the prototypes. IJnfortugItcly, not only Get-c the options identi-
cal,
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but the correct option rcnairicd as the snmc key across all tests. It w3s
subsequently ‘discovcrcd that this proccdur~ increased the* ChUCcS for test
c0mpr0niise, much murc than usual. The reason is that
any DLL graduates would
cithsr subsequently rrcnroll in a different language Course
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or take a DLPT to
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establislh military competency in a foreign languagr studied clscuhcre.
Fur thcrmorc, an crroncous assumption was more than
that since a11 the tests were parallel in content
therefore all have the same lt;~l of difficulty. For this reason, no attempt
was made LO standnrdizc raw scores and the snmc skill-level cut-off scores
were used across al 1 lnnguagcs. This initial assumption was unfortunate
and was incorrect as later validation data di.sprovcd the theory.
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