چکیده:
The motive behind this study was to evaluate the Iranian State University EFL Entrance Examination Test (UEEET) based on Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) ‘Usefulness Six-faceted Model ‘accommodating Relia-bility, Validity, Impact, Interactiveness, Authenticity, and Practicality. To do so, thirty professors and one-hundred EFL freshmen were selected randomly from five universities. A questionnaire consisting of thirty likert-scale items and six open-ended questions were developed based on Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) framework. They were administered to both groups of the participants along with the 2013 sample of the Iranian State UEEET. In addition to the questionnaire, a structured interview consisting of ten questions was also run for the purpose of triangulation of the data. Based on the findings, both groups evaluated the UEEET mainly less reliable, less practical and entailing negative impacts, while they held positive views towards its validity, authenticity, and interactiveness. Certain contradictions in the results leave the space open for further investigations, of course. Overall, the UEEET is evaluated as a test enjoy-ing an acceptable degree of the Usefulness criteria.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Major dimensions of test usefulness according to Bachman and Palmer (1996) are then briefly addressed as follows: Reliability Defined as consistency of measurement, reliabil- ity covers and should be evaluated based on a range of parameters such as variation of test scores in terms of administration, test rubrics and forms, input and response type and characteristics and relevance, etc.
36): Available resources and areas of test taker’s language ability, topical Practicality = Required resources knowledge, affective schemata and task charac- teristics that each of which covers many dimen- sions as elaborated by Bachman and Palmer (1996) and documented in the pertinent Ques- tionnaire designed for the purpose of this study.
To this end, the main purpose of this study was to evaluate the Iranian State UEEET in terms of six test qualities includ- ing reliability, validity ,impact , interactiveness , authenticity, and practicality as suggested by Bachman and Palmer (1996), from the perspec- tives of both instructors and students in order to find out its strengths and weaknesses and also help test developers and policy makers to make proper modifications so that they can improve the quality of this nationwide exam in order to achieve a bal- ance among the qualities of test usefulness (Bachman & Palmer, 1996) and set the minimum acceptable levels for each.
According to teachers’ ideas displayed in Table 21, the UEEET is rather consisted to Target Language Use situation because of the correspondence between charac- teristics of TLU domain and the characteristics of the test items."