Understanding Your Screening Test Results
Both the free test and full-length screening test provide results in the form of an approximate CEFR level. The free test is recommended only for no-stakes self-assessment. For more reliable results, we recommend using the full-length screening test, as explained below.
What is CEFR?
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) is a widely recognized international standard for describing language ability. The table at the bottom of this page explains what the CEFR level means about a test taker’s language abilities.
We map the scaled score of our test (a score between 20-120) to a CEFR level to give you a better idea of what that scaled score means.
Why is the free test score approximate?
It all has to do with how reliable the test it.
Reliability is an indicator of how consistently, or reliably, something measures what it is intended to measure from one time to the next. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a thermometer or an English test, in order for it to be useful, it needs to be reliable. For example, every time you set your kitchen oven to 350 degrees, you expect the internal temperature of that oven to come to 350 degrees. Every time. Otherwise, your cakes will come out raw one time and burned the next.
Similarly, in order for tests to be useful, they need to provide reliably consistent results from one test administration to the next. The person reliability index, a number between 0 and 1, is an indicator of how much confidence you can have in the reliability of those results. The higher the number, the better.
A generally accepted rule of thumb says that high-stakes tests should have a person reliability index between .90 and 1.00. These tests can be used to support high-stakes decisions, such as college admission or professional certification. On the other hand, a person reliability index between .70 and .89 is generally considered to appropriate for low-to-mid stakes tests, such as screening tests or placement tests. Tests with a reliability index below .70 should only be used for zero-stakes purposes, such as self-assessment.
Due to its very short 5-minute length, the free test achieved a reliability of 0.59. For that reason, we provide a very approximate score and only recommend the free test for no-stakes, self-assessment purposes.
For more reliable results that can be used for low-to-mid stakes uses like employment screening, we recommend using the full-length screening test, which has a much stronger reliability of 0.86.
As the name implies, the full-length is longer. It collects twice as much data as the free test, which is why it is significantly more reliable.
Download the white paper for even more details about the test format and validation process.
What does each approximate CEFR level mean?
The table below shows how our scaled scores map to CEFR, and what each CEFR level indicates about language abilities according to the Council of Europe descriptors.
