FACTORS RELEVANT TO THE ELTS EVALUATION
Background
Political factors
Political insights at the national level meant careful attention to issues such as test exemptions. It was always accepted that a student from, say, New Zealand would not be expected to sit the test on the grounds that New Zealand is an English-speaking country. But whether the same dispensation applied to countries such as the West Indies or India was an open question. And there were uncertainties too about blanket exemption for countries such as New Zealand, since it was always possible that a candidate from New Zealand (with New Zealand citizenship) might have been educated in, say, Thailand and have used New Zealand only as a base for university applications.
It was necessary, therefore, to consider the question of exemption carefully and to recommend offering exemption not on the basis of nationality or provenance but on the basis of individual educational history. Given the complicated history of English medium education in the colonies and ex-colonies, this would not avoid all objections but it was probably fairer than country-wide exemptions. An issue that clearly needed addressing was whether all exemptions should be completely removed so that everyone not schooled in the UK should be required to take the test.
Political sensitivity was also necessary on the more local scale, that is in terms of the extent to which ELTS was in practice being used as a normative instrument. Those whose applications were processed by the British Council were in two large categories, British Council scholars whose admission depended on their satisfying the Council’s own fairly strict guidelines, and other students who had gained admission to a British university direct and whose English was being tested by the British Council simply as an agent of the admitting university. The issue here was whether the admitting university had any serious interest in the level of English of its incoming students or whether it was ignoring the test results on the grounds that a student would be able to pick up adequate English once admitted. More crudely in such cases, it was not so much the English of an overseas student that mattered as the fees they paid. Fees increasingly dominated UK university activities through the 1980s and 1990s, as market forces became more and more important.
