Principles of Good Practice
The Cambridge ESOL Principles of Good Practice booklet outlines the systems and processes that drive our search for excellence and continuous improvement.
Quality management and validation in language assessment
Our quality management systems involve complex research and technology, but the underlying philosophy is simple:
Validity – are our exams an authentic test of real-life English?
Reliability – do our exams behave consistently and fairly?
Impact – does our assessment have a positive effect on teaching and learning?
Practicality – does our assessment meet learners’ needs within available resources?
Quality – how we plan, deliver and check that we provide excellence in all of these fields.
Principles of Good Practice
We have published this guide to:
- make our claims for quality assessment transparent
- give teachers, researchers, policymakers and others interested in our exams further insight into our processes
- share best practice with the wider world of language learning and assessment.
Download Principles of Good Practice
Exam reliability data
In Principles of Good Practice, we state our commitment to providing users with data that will allow them to evaluate for themselves the reliability of our exams (appendix, Reliability section F).
That data, which will be updated annually, can be found on the Research and Validation microsite. We have also outlined the tools and analysis that we have used to develop these figures for those unfamiliar with the systems of analysing and reporting test reliability.
Go to Research and Validation website
