As part of its nationwide foreign language initiative, the Colombian Ministerio de Educación Nacional (MEN) contacted Cambridge ESOL to provide a benchmarking test to evaluate the prevailing English-language levels of school and university students.
The tests were taken in November 2005 and February 2006 involving more than 5,000 students. Cambridge ESOL conducted the analysis of performance and the results have been used by MEN and the Instituto Colombiano para el Fomento de la Educación Superior (ICFES) to inform on standards.
In 2007, new national English examinations were introduced in Colombia in line with these new standards, which relate directly to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
A total of 600,000 students took the new exams in 2007. Cambridge ESOL has also been contracted to produce the English component of the Colombian state sector exams and is undertaking local capacity-building in Colombia. The project is ongoing and will be featured in detail in a future edition of Cambridge First.
Annette Capel (second from right back row) Ken McIntyre (third from left front row) and Alexis Lopez (first on left back row), from Cambridge ESOL, plus Martha Galvis (first on left front row) from the British Council and Elizabeth Gonzalez (fourth from left front row) from ICFES. Annette and her team were supervising the first item writer training session in Colombia. As a result of the training, ICFES (the national examination body in Colombia) now has a team of 15 new item writers who will start to work immediately on producing English test items for the 2008 Examen de Estado (national school-leaving exam) and ECAES (national university exit exam).