I've been thinking a lot in the past few years about the validity of instructor-assessed final grades in English for Academic Purposes courses and how evidence can be gathered to contribute to the validity of these types of grades. One on-going study that I've been involved with has been looking at the relationship between instructor-assessed EAP final grades and standardized English language proficiency test scores administered at the end of an EAP course. The first paper published out of this study is in the Autumn 2014 issue of the International Student Experience Journal (http://isejournal.weebly.com/), and the paper looks at the concurrent validity of instructor-assessed EAP final grades. Correlational analysis was used to compare the EAP final grades with TOEFL ITP scores that were gathered at the end of the semester. There were statistically significant moderate correlations, contributing to the idea of concurrent validity, but the was also enough of a divergence to point to meaningful differences in what the instructors were assessing and what the TOEFL ITP was assessing.
The article can be found in the current issue here: http://isejournal.weebly.com/current-issue.html
