Fairness and Justice in Language Assessment

The concept of fairness , as related to assessment and assessment practice, has been debated regularly since the late 1980s, but disagreements have regularly surfaced regarding interpretation and scope of the term. Further, researchers have argued that fairness is made up of an incoherent list and practitioners have questioned the need to include fairness as part of the assessment development process. The term justice is rarely mentioned in the assessment literature, although the idea of justice has been discussed by philosophers from ancient times. This chapter attempts to provide principled bases for fairness and justice as applied to the institution of assessment. This is done by applying the idea of fairness as relating to persons—how assessments ought to be fair to test takers—and the idea of justice as relating to institutions—how institutions ought to be just to test takers. Arguments from normative ethics regarding fairness and justice are then discussed in order to provide an appropriate background for the principles of fairness and justice that are proposed and discussed through hypothetical vignettes about pretesting, biased and defective tasks, selecting an assessment, public reasoning, and differential pricing for services. The chapter concludes with how these principles can be used to advance fairness and justice in language assessment.