For the first time this fall, incoming students interested in pursuing Chinese or German language studies were able to take their placement exams in electronic form, including questions with rich multimedia examples embedded. The CALT (Computer-assisted Language Testing) system was developed by UIT Academic Technology, building on the QuestionMark application. Approximately seventy students participated in the placement exams on August 31, 2006, and the CALT system and its reporting tools performed seamlessly. The faculty guiding this project are Mingquan Wang from Chinese and Bernhard Martin and Saskia Stoessel from German, all in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages. Based on the success of this fall’s tests, the faculty hope to extend online placement testing to all language programs and to enable pre-matriculation students to take their placement tests from a distance before they arrive at Tufts.
