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True story: I didn't bring my calculator with me when I went to take the SAT Math subject test. Oops. However, I was already sitting there, and had already paid, and they told me I could take any SAT II test I wanted, so I randomly took the Biology test and got 760 out of 800 on it. Not surprising, you say? But the thing is, I had never taken a day of biology.

The point is, good test design is actually hard.

Paul Nation's "Vocabulary Size Test" has a good approach to the challenge of determining how many words someone knows. Even with this relatively simple-to-state metric, there's a good bit of subtlety in getting a defensible result.

https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/pau...



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