Based on its purpose

learning problems and helping students with their educational and vocational plans. Aptitude tests are often used in selecting individuals for jobs, for admission to training program, for scholarship, and for many other purposes. Sometimes aptitude tests are used for classifying individuals, as when students are assigned to different ability-grouped sections of the same course. 5 2 Achievement Test Achievement tests measure what a person has learnt during a course of instruction. It is given at the end of the course. The content of achievement tests is generally based on the course of syllabus or the course textbook. Achievement test is designed to indicate degree of success in some past learning activity. This purpose of achievement test is obviously different with the purpose of aptitude test, where the aptitude test is designed to predict success in some future learning activity. A distinction between these two tests is made in terms of the use of the results rather than of the qualities of the test themselves. 6 Assessment and evaluation are term often used in connection with achievement testing. The purpose of the testing is for assessing present attainment. With achievement tests, we are trying to measure students’ present attainment. 7 A common distinction is that achievement tests measure what a student has learned, and aptitude tests measure the ability to learn new tasks. 8 5 Howard B. Lyman, Test Scores and What They Mean, Singapore: Allyn Bacon, 1998, p.22. 6 Drs. Wilmar Tinambunan, Evaluation of Student Achievement, Jakarta: Depdikbud, 1998, p.7. 7 Howard B. Lyman, Test Score……….., p. 22 8 Robert L. Linn, Norman E. Gronlund, Measurement and Assessment in Teaching, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1995, p. 391-392. There are two kinds of achievement test, final achievement test and progress achievement test. 9 Final achievement test is that administered at the end of the course of study. They may be written and administered by ministries of education, official examining board, or by member of teaching institutions. On the other hand, progress achievement test are intended to measure the progress that students are making. They contribute to formative assessment. Since, progress is toward the achievement of course objective, therefore this test should relate to objective. 3 Proficiency test Proficiency test are designed to measure people’s ability in a language regardless of any training they may have had in that language. The content of a proficiency test, therefore, is not based on the content or objectives of language courses that people taking the test may have followed. Rather, it is based on a specification of what candidates have to be able to do in the language in order to be considered proficient. 10 It means that the function of the test is to show whether the candidates have reached certain specific abilities or not. Some proficiency tests are intended to show whether students have reached a given level of general language ability. Others are designed to show whether students have sufficient ability to be able to use a language in some specific area such as medicine, tourism or academic study or not. 4 Diagnostic Test The diagnostic tests seek to identify those are in which a student needs further help. These tests can be fairly general, and show, for example, whether a student needs particular help with one of the four 9 Desmon Allison, Language Testing and Evaluation, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1999, p. 80 10 Arthur Hughes, Testing for Language …, p. 11. main language skills; or they can be more specific, seeking perhaps to identify weaknesses in a student’s use of grammar. These more specific diagnostic tests are not easy to design since it is difficult to diagnose precisely strengths and weaknesses in the complexities of language ability. For this reason, there are very few purely diagnostic tests.

b. Based on the Test Maker

1 Standardized Test Standardized tests are constructed by test specialists working with curriculum experts and teachers. They are standardized in that they have been administered and scored under standard and uniform testing conditions so that results from different classes and different schools may be compared. The quality of the test items in this test is high quality because the test items are made by the specialist. Those test items are also pretested and selected on basis of effectiveness. 2 Teacher-Made Test Teacher made test are constructed by teachers for use within their own classroom. Their effectiveness depends on the skill of the teacher and his or her knowledge of test construction. The quality of test items in this test is unknown unless the test item file is used. But the quality is typically lower than standardized test because of teacher’s limited time and skill. Because this test is conducted within teacher own classroom so that the test only compare the score among the student in that classroom. In general, teacher made examinations have flexibility for use within a given classroom, but provide little data for comparing students in different classes. Standardized tests, in contrast, are used to compare students’ performance in different classes or schools. 11 11 Gilbert Sax, Principles of Educational and Psychological Measurement and Evaluation, Belmont: Wadsworth, Inc., 1980, p. 16-18.

3. Characteristic of a Good Test

The test can be said as the good test I it has the certain qualifications or the certain characteristics. The most essential characteristic of the good test can be classified into three main aspect, they are, validity, reliability, and practicality. 12

a. Validity

The most simplistic definition of validity is that it is degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to be measure. J.B Heaton said, “The validity of the test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure and nothing else”. 13 The validity of a test must be considered in measurement in this case there must be seen whether the test used really measures what are supposed to measure.

b. Reliability

Reliability means dependability or trustworthiness. Basically, reliability is the degree to which a test consistently measures whatever it measures. The more reliable a test is, the more confidence we can have the scores obtained from the administration of the test are essentially the same scores that would be obtained if the test were re-administered to the same group. An unreliable test is essentially useless. If a test were unreliable then scores from a given group would be expected to be quite different every time the test was administered. If an intelligence test were unreliable, a student scoring an IQ of 120 today might score 140 tomorrow, and 95 the day after tomorrow If the test were highly reliable and if the students’ IQ were 110, then we would not expect that score to fluctuate too greatly from testing to testing. 12 Norman E Gronlund, Measurement and …, p.51. 13 J.B Heaton, Writing Language Test, Longman: 1998, p.153.