High stakes assessment: has there come a time to do something about it?

The market has put on the surface the need of establishing tests which will be used for assessing proficiency in English needed for different purposes, e. g. further education or employment. There are many standardized high stakes assessment tests available on the market, the most popular being TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, TSE, CELS, OPI and SIOP. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, most of the tests used for this type of assessment have been made individually either by institutions (usually private language schools) or teachers themselves, with claims of having fulfilled the CEFR standards in total when designing the tests. In an effort to shed light of the present status of high stakes assessment, a small-scale research has been made in order to establish whether any detailed insight into the problem is needed at all. A test used in a privately owned institution has been taken as a specimen for the purpose of this study and looked into in detail. The analysis has had its focus on issues of validity, reliability and washback effect of the test itself, as well as on the impact of the test on instruction and student attitudes. Furthermore, some additional considerations, such as whether the test covers what it claims to measure and the very aspects of English language proficiency the test does not cover, have also been discussed. What is obvious from the research is the fact that though there still exists a huge discrepancy between some aspects of high stakes assessment in general and needs of the present day market, there has been a substantial progress made as far as balancing approach to interpreting and using test data for the benefits of all the sides involved in the process in concerned