Hi,

That's a thought-provoking post!

I don't share your opinion, as I don't think you can find questions unrelated that have "little to do with the language knowledge", as you put it.  Let's take the exercise you mention, for instance. Its purpose is to measure the candidate's ability to understand cohesion and coherence in a text, not his or her knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, True, whoever is going to do this kind of exercise (native or not) needs to be trained, to learn what to look for (clues, such as temporal adverbs, or pronouns and their referents), and so on. I am positive that any adult native speaker with an average level of education and IQ would pass this type of test!

As for tests being able to measure knowledge of the language, I agree they have their weaknesses.
First and foremost, tests like the TOEFL and the IELTS (and, to a lesser extent, the CAE and the CPE) have become "cash cows" because international students who want to enroll in universities in the USA and the UK respectively are required to pass these exams with a high mark (I happen to know some people who have taken the TOEFL a couple of times before getting the desired score, and the fee in my country is $185 ... not bad, uh?). Second, as it happens with every exam, candidates are put into a very stressful situation, which may disadvantage somebody (I mean, you might have studied hard and know a lot, and yet you might be failed because you were tired or had a bad day...).

Just out of curiosity, would you be able to put forward an alternative way of assessing one's level of competence in a foreign language?
(Sorry for being so curious, but have you taken any of these exams?)

Hi,

magixo

“Well, everybody is entitled to have his/her own opinion.”

magixo

“Language is not a science, it is a means of communication.”

I'm with you on these.

I agree with Tanit. The ability to grasp cohesion and coherence is not so easy to be estimated. I'm Russian and if  in my language some kind of that exams take place, sometimes it's not possible to distinguish unambigously in words why the only word should be used. In English the same way occurs. Language is very complicated structure which can flow in its own way, changing and updating. You should work hard, but it's not only the way to come off.

magixo

“Well, to be able to measure the candidate's ability to understand cohesion you need to define it first.”

Can you strictly define for example the way a writer narrate? In CAE and CPE you should feel the text and of course it can be accomplished after spending much time on reading, deliberating and comprehending literature, grammar, the way of general structures of language, making some sort of analyzation.

magixo

“I strongly disagree with you here. I have asked many American students, who are my very good friends, to try the gapped text exercise. They had lots of problems with that.”

It's not the argument, I guess. I also know some guys who make so many mistakes in their own language that I hardly can call them half-literate (I mean generally, don't take it privately). Exams define intelligence, erudition and as most important the way people deem. CAE and CPE are not like a grammar's and checking tests.