Rating learners of English as a foreign language: Rating Scales vs. Rapid Profile

Rating the learner is an important part of language teaching. Tests can be used to place students in courses according to their knowledge, to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses, to identify their proficiency etc. There are many theories about what tests should analyse and how they should be taken. Depending on the relevance of the results, the ratings need to be more or less accurate. Furthermore, they should have a beneficial backwash on teaching. It is thus at least as important to examine rating itself as it is to look at teaching methods.
As there are many different ways of rating language students, this work will concentrate on two specific approaches: rating scales and Rapid Profile. Whereas the first have been in use for a while, Rapid Profile is a newly developed computer programme which has not been discussed very much so far. It is thus particularly interesting to compare the two rating methods in order to investigate their advantages and disadvantages.