How Suitable Is the CEFR for Setting University Entrance Standards?

ABSTRACT

The discussion takes up the common theme across the seven contributions of this special issue, namely the CEFR’s suitability as a basis for setting university entrance standards. The special issue allows insights into this theme from a multitude of contexts, languages and perspectives, including data from stakeholders, students, tests and their documentations, as well as student performances and teacher judgements. The contributions of the seven papers are first discussed with a view to examining current practices of setting entrance requirements and the suitability of the CEFR as a means of comparison between different tests and contexts. The discussion then moves on to acknowledge that the CEFR alone cannot guarantee that different institutions and stakeholders will use it in a comparable way and come to comparable interpretations when employing and interpreting its proficiency scales. In order to overcome these challenges, possible ways of dealing with discrepancies when comparing different tests and contexts that are suggested by the seven contributions in this special issue are discussed, with a particular view on how these contributions answer earlier calls for further research. Finally, the discussion outlines ways forward to improve practices and stimulate future research in the realm of setting university entrance requirements.

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors of this special issue whose insightful feedback much improved the earlier drafts. All remaining errors are mine.

Notes

¹ I add the full quotation here to clarify in which way Van Ek (1975, p. 8) envisioned this to be the case: “To some extent then, the threshold level is a kind of standard reference level. Because it is, so far as we know, more explicit in more dimensions of linguistic analysis than any previous statement Of linguistic objectives, the content of any other course, any other examination syllabus, any linguistic or communicative proficiency can be measured against it insofar as it can be made equally explicit. In this way, it is suitable as a basis for the establishment of a system of equivalences.”