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<p style="text-align:justify;">The past decade has&nbsp;witnessed growing interest in Higher Education (HE) achievement standards and the&nbsp;comparability of program learning outcomes. The HE sector has historically&nbsp;focused on assuring academic standards through two key approaches: standardized&nbsp;educational testing and external peer review of assessment. Both approaches are&nbsp;resource and time intensive. In particular, the English Language Teaching (ELT)&nbsp;sector, which provides international students with Direct Entry (DE) pathways&nbsp;to English medium university study, has been predominately focused on high stakes&nbsp;English language testing. Commercially available tests enable providers to&nbsp;demonstrate clear evidence of ELT DE program standards in terms of internationally&nbsp;recognised scores. English language tests, however, represent only one type of&nbsp;external reference point for assuring standards. This paper provides an&nbsp;overview of a sector-led, collaborative approach to external review of&nbsp;assessment across 20 Australian university operated DE English programs. Twenty-eight&nbsp;ELT units were benchmarked by sixty individual assessors using consensus&nbsp;moderation against the newly expanded Common European Framework of Reference&nbsp;(CEFR), a validated language proficiency framework. This case study demonstrates&nbsp;that collaborative benchmarking using the updated CEFR can effectively ensure DE&nbsp;ELT program standards to the benefit of staff and students globally.</p>

A Collaborative Approach to Assuring Standards: Using the CEFR to Benchmark University Pathway Programs’ English Language Outcomes

Original Research 

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