Lisa wrote:IWhile clever test design can attempt to thwart people like me (a good human can always tell, I think, but standardization doesn't like relying on humans),
This (and the rest) is a great point. It's not for nothing that there is 'exam training' and that it is geared as closely as possible toward what is likely to be on the tests. So that the entire thing can to some level only be about X-language in the world of CEFR or whatever the testing system is.
The thing you said about tests and people who are good at navigating them is, for want of a better word, a
problem for both tests, people like that, and others who might look at at the result of such a person and say to themselves that all they need to do is ask that person what they read/did etc and reproduce the result. Which is actually quite a lot of what happens in language-learning discussion.
I'm certainly not hyper-critical of what the CEFR courses, exams try to do, but it's certainly not foolproof. I think they admit this themselves.