Everything I wrote earlier about the value-laden nature of assessment practices—that they are oriented to product rather than process, that they favor certain candidates over others, that they are used for administrative convenience rather than serving the needs of the learners—applies in spades in the case of standardized tests such as the TOEFL. Yet the TOEFL and its ilk also raise an additional set of moral concerns and dilemmas. Elana Shohamy (1998), one of the first people to raise questions about the “ethical” dimensions of language testing, described the widespread use of standardized tests to promote bureaucratic and political agendas. She identified three ethical consequences of such uses of tests:
1. The “institutionalized knowledge” (p. 339) that tests canonize is “narrow, simplistic and often different from experts’ knowledge” (p. 339). The kind of knowledge tested, which often involves single-word answers in multiple-choice formats, “overlooks the complexities of subject matter and is unmeaningful for repair” (p. 339).
2. A “parallel system” (p. 340) is created whereby stated policy is at odds with the “organizational aspirations” reflected in the tests. Shohamy gave the example of Israel, where “both Hebrew and Arabic are official languages, yet, on the high school entrance exam Arabs are tested in Hebrew, while Hebrew speakers are not tested in Arabic” (p. 340).
3. Ethical problems arise when “the test becomes a means through which the policy makers communicate priorities to the system” (p. 340). Shohamy sees this as “undemocratic and unethical” (p. 340) because those affected by the test—the students who take it and the teachers who teach them—have no say in the design and implementation of the test. This last point deserves further consideration. I would argue that the most serious moral concerns with such tests arise from their imper-sonal nature. As Shohamy (1998) pointed The Morality of Testing and Assessment 70 out, the people affected by the test have no say in its creation; through such procedures it is much easier to maintain the myth of the objective test, because the people who create the questions and assess performance are nowhere around—unlike with a teacher or school department, to which students usually have some kind of access.
1. The “institutionalized knowledge” (p. 339) that tests canonize is “narrow, simplistic and often different from experts’ knowledge” (p. 339). The kind of knowledge tested, which often involves single-word answers in multiple-choice formats, “overlooks the complexities of subject matter and is unmeaningful for repair” (p. 339).
2. A “parallel system” (p. 340) is created whereby stated policy is at odds with the “organizational aspirations” reflected in the tests. Shohamy gave the example of Israel, where “both Hebrew and Arabic are official languages, yet, on the high school entrance exam Arabs are tested in Hebrew, while Hebrew speakers are not tested in Arabic” (p. 340).
3. Ethical problems arise when “the test becomes a means through which the policy makers communicate priorities to the system” (p. 340). Shohamy sees this as “undemocratic and unethical” (p. 340) because those affected by the test—the students who take it and the teachers who teach them—have no say in the design and implementation of the test. This last point deserves further consideration. I would argue that the most serious moral concerns with such tests arise from their imper-sonal nature. As Shohamy (1998) pointed The Morality of Testing and Assessment 70 out, the people affected by the test have no say in its creation; through such procedures it is much easier to maintain the myth of the objective test, because the people who create the questions and assess performance are nowhere around—unlike with a teacher or school department, to which students usually have some kind of access.
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