THE CALCULATION OF CUT OFF SCORE IN ROMANIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE PRETEST AND EXAMINATIONS

The Calculation of Cut off Score in Romanian as a Foreign Language Pretest and Examinations. While our educational and professional lives have been deeply influenced by our language abilities, companies and institutions rely more and more on formal evidence of these. Thus, organisations issuing language certificates have a great responsibility, related to the quality of the tests that they apply and the validity and reliability of the examinations. An essential element in this whole process is the cut off score, which needs to be set in relation with the purpose of the examination, the structure and the input of the test and the characteristics of the test taking population. The calculation of the cut off score in relation with these factors became central to the examination process for Romanian as a foreign language at Babeș-Bolyai University. The way in which this is set was decided in preparation for the auditing process with ALTE (the Association of Language Testers in Europe), an audit which our suit of examinations passed successfully. We apply the method of contrastive groups, based on the expertise of the test takers’ teachers and on the students’ results for every component of the examination and of pretest. Thus, the limit of passing/failing an examination is not set beforehand and just applied to each examination, all relevant factors being, instead, considered. The procedure we implemented for the calculation resulted in a higher reliability of the test takers’ results and also of the tests in the long term.