Language proficiency is one of the most important workplace skills today. For many roles, it’s critical to assess language proficiency during the hiring process, but many language assessments on the market have a couple of key flaws. For example, the assessment might be too long, too hard, or too easy for the candidate, leading to a frustrating candidate experience. The assessment might be limited in the types of skills it assesses. And if it includes a writing portion, the assessment may take a long time to grade.
This is why we built an innovative new assessment that directly solves these problems.
The Criteria Language Proficiency Test (CLPT) is a fast and flexible assessment that measures language proficiency at any level, for any role. This first release focuses on measuring English language proficiency.
What makes the CLPT different?
The Criteria Language Proficiency Test solves a lot of the problems that traditional language proficiency tests face. For example, the CLPT is:
- Customizable: You can choose to assess any skill area you like, whether that includes reading skills, listening skills, writing skills, or all the above.
- Faster: The CLPT uses adaptive scoring to adjust the difficulty of the questions based on how the candidate responds. This enables the assessment to pinpoint the candidate’s skill level faster, with fewer questions than a non-adaptive assessment. Plus, you can choose an even faster version of the assessment, called CLPT-Express, which candidates can complete in as little as seven minutes.
- Candidate-friendly: A faster assessment provides a better experience for candidates, and increases candidate completion rates. The adaptive scoring also tailors the question difficulty for each candidate, ensuring that the candidate doesn’t get frustrated by questions that are either too easy or too hard.
- Device-agnostic: The CLPT was built to be taken on any device, including most phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
- Rigorously validated: Our team of I/O psychologists constructed the assessment through a rigorous and scientifically robust process, from the development of the initial items through to the psychometric validation.
- Aligned with CEFR: The assessment has been shown to correlate highly with results using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a widely accepted international guideline used to describe language ability. Score reports for the modular version of the CLPT show how the scores align against the CEFR equivalent.
- Job-related: The questions and prompts in the assessment are related to common on-the-job or generic situations, so the assessment directly relates to the type of language your candidates would hear once hired.
- Culturally sensitive: Items and prompts are reviewed by sensitivity experts to ensure they are applicable across cultures and ethnic groups.
- Scored in an instant: After a candidate completes the CLPT, the results are available instantly. Many language proficiency tests require people to spend extra time grading the writing portions of the responses, which creates a delay in the process. Other language proficiency assessments simply skip the writing portion entirely. With CLPT, we leverage responsible AI to grade the writing portions, enabling you to receive a score report for each candidate as soon as they complete the assessment.
The CLPT is the most flexible language proficiency assessment on the market today, and we’re beyond excited to announce that it is now available to all our customers.
