The best online Mandarin proficiency test I've seen

[necroflux]

I found a very high quality Chinese proficiency test on the Web site for a Taiwanese university. http://cpt.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/tma2/

There are multiple levels, and the test is very comprehensive and very high quality. I found the Intermediate level to be a bit hard for me, I scored about 50% for the portion I took (only the first twenty questions), so I probably wouldn't be able to pass it if I took it today. This is after about 1 and a half years of studying, so that's a bit disappointing. Let us know how you do!

[karzhou]

Oh! It's hard for me

[Josh-J]

That looks like a useful measuring tool - now I know that "Beginner" is still far above me

[kkoma]

谢谢

[rose~]

Thanks. What did you put for 學號?

[venture160]

Here is another one, don't know how good it is, but its fairly long. Both listening and written comprehension.

I got 6 in both areas.

http://www.chinesehorizon.com/placementTest.cfm

BTW, that link does not work for me.

[ironlady]

The NTNU test is slanted toward Taiwan; if you haven't lived there for awhile, you may not do as well as your actual level of standard Chinese would indicate. It's the same for people who study Mandarin in Taiwan for years and achieve a fairly good level; you're lost (or at least shaken up a bit!) when you are thrown into Chinese from the PRC.

Culture is important, but the question of how much culture should appropriately be incorporated into a proficiency test is an interesting one to me. For example, if I'm not familiar with "yi ya san chi", does that mean my Chinese is poor? Probably it just means I don't eat at duck restaurants in Taiwan very much. It sort of reminds me of the TOEFL and how there is/was so much emphasis on idioms. What I mean is that a test item should be measuring one thing and one thing only. Writing an item like "Read the following paragraph. Which of the following chengyu best sums up the meaning of the paragraph?" is an invalid test question, because you can't tell whether the student did understand the passage or not. Maybe he could read every word, but didn't know the key chengyu to get the answer. The item is testing two things at once.

Another example off an NTNU grad-school entrance exam for Chinese language proficiency: This was a listening item, and the multiple-choice answers were all numbers. "Lao Zhang goes to the post office and buys three one-dollar stamps, two three dollars stamps and one five dollar stamp. How many stamps does he buy in all?" Obviously anyone past Chinese 101 could understand the passage perfectly well, but he might not be able to manipulate the numbers quickly enough to choose the answer -- and there's no way to anticipate whether the answer will be "How much did he spend?" or "How many stamps did he buy?". Poor test-writing.