A Validation Study of Korean High School-based English Exams

Due to the critical importance of Korean college early admissions, careful consideration should be given to the quality of test items on Korean high school English exams, and more effort needs to be made to rectify problems with the exams. The present study was conducted to determine the validity of these exams, using the theoretical framework of Target Language Use (TLU), with a focus on the one selected quality, reliability. To assess reliability, a combined analysis was conducted, including an item and options analysis of 148 students’ optical mark reader (OMR) responses on 50 multiple-choice items by Test Analysis Program (TAP). Further analysis was done, utilizing various corpus-based web tools for investigating syntactic and lexical complexities, vocabulary coverage, and readability scores. Lastly, scores were compared for two periodical exams (midterm and final exams) and one monthly English exam, taken by 117 students. The results showed that as a part of the implementation of high school English written exams, a more thorough development of attractive distractors and the use of corpus-analysis tools would greatly improve the reliability of these exams.