The present use of paper and pencil (P&P) language assessment has several important limitations:
  1. Personnel
    Preparing new assessments, administering these, scoring student responses, and preparing reports for various end users places a heavy demand on limited human resources.
  2. Scheduling
    Scheduling of test administrations is infrequent, inflexible, and often at times not convenient for all students.
  3. Authenticity of assessment tasks
    P&P format limits the kinds of content and materials that can be administered in a test.
  4. Use of new measurement teachnology
    P&P format does not take advantage of recent developments in educational measurement–e.g., item response theory and computer-adaptive algorithms for tailored assessment.
WebLAS aims to address the limitations of the P&P format by providing:
  1. Greater efficiency in creating, administering and scoring language assessments
  2. More flexible and frequent scheduling
  3. More authentic, interactive and valid assessments of language ability
UCLA Dept. of Applied Linguistics/TESL and Center for Digital Humanities, 2001-2003