The Development of an English Proficiency Test for Undergraduate Students in Business Administration Faculty at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Rayong Campus

Abstract

This research aimed to develop an English proficiency test for undergraduate students in Business Administration Faculty at King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Rayong Campus, and verify the quality of the English proficiency test in terms of validity, difficulty, discrimination, and reliability. The participants were 222 undergraduate students who enrolled the pre co-operative education subject in the first semester of 2020 academic year using the simple random sampling. The research instrument was the English proficiency test with 5 multiple choices created by using the concept of Bloom's Taxonomy. The test totally consisted of 100 question items, was equally divided into 2 sets for two groups of the students in each experiment. There were 50 question items for the students in each group. The results showed that:

1) The development of the English proficiency test revealed that the question items were in accordance with the content validity which the IOC index of consistency was between 0.67 - 1.00. The quality verification of the test in terms of validity, difficulty, discrimination, and reliability found that in the second experiment, the difficulty index (p) of the first set was between 0.22 - 0.71 and the discrimination index (r) was between 0.20 - 0.56. For the second set, the difficulty index (p) was between 0.21 - 0.72 and the discrimination index (r) was between 0.20 - 0.74. The results of reliability analysis of all the 2 sets of the test with the method of Kuder-Richardson 20 (KR-20) showed that the internal consistency reliability of the first set was 0.78, and the second set was 0.84. In summary, this stated that all the 100 question items were reliable and consistent.

2) From the two experiments indicated that the students from the first set received an average score of 22.04 accounting for 44.08% out of the total marks. There were percentile between 0.25 - 99.75, and raw scores between 7 - 45 marks. For the normalized T - Scores, the value was between T_21.90 - T_78.10 with percentile at 51.75 and raw scores were 21 marks. For the second set, the students received an average score of 22.56 with 45.12% out of the total marks. There were percentile between 0.50 - 99.75, and raw scores between 7 - 44 marks. For the normalized T - Scores, the value was between T_24.25 - T_75.75 with percentile at 50.25 and raw scores were 22 marks. For this reason, it could be concluded that all the 100 question items of the test were qualified and acceptable. However, the students’ average score was low. Therefore, educational institutes should set some action plans to expedite the development of students' English proficiency.