An Investigation of English Listening Items on the Korean Scholastic Aptitude Tests

Abstract

This paper investigates the English listening items of the two Korean Scholastic Aptitude Tests (KSAT) for college entrance which were conducted in August and in November 1993. In 1993, listening items were included in the KSAT for the first time in the 70-year history of Korean college/university entrance examinations, and in that year 745,000 students took the KSAT. Since almost all of the students took both of the alternative KSATs offered at different times in 2993, there arose a valuable chance to investigate the 16 items of the two English listening tests. The major concerns of the study are item difficulty, item response rate, item discrimination, reliability, and correlation of the two tests. For the investigation, the researcher focused on a randomly selected group of subjects which made upfive percent of the total examinees. The overall listening items of the two KSATS were desirable in regards to item difficulty and item discrimination of the test. However, the correlation and reliability of the listening items of the two tests were found to be lower than desirable, mainly due to the small number of test items. This study also describes positive results of the inclusion of listening items for English education in Korea.