With all of the Black Friday message, I kind of buried the lead on that post where I talked about the ODA from the US Defense Language Institute.
The tests are much longer and more general than the short little tests on Dialang. It makes sense that a 2 hour test would do a better job than the little 30 question tests on dialang. If one has to get feedback on their language level from an online test, the ODA seems to be in a class of its own. Dialang seems to be built around a small set of topics, ODA has everything under the sun in it. Topics were all over the place, and it seemed to be more in depth than dialang. The test was clearly adaptive.
I only took the reading test so far, but the listening test sounds like it may be quite similar. I'll try it one of these days. I bet I'll be somewhere around a 2 on it, since my speaking and listening are well below my reading ability.
Anyway, I got a 3 or higher as my score on reading, which is probably either a B2 or C1 or higher on the CEFR. It is reassuring to have proof that I have actually learned something, and am not just deluding myself somehow.
I'll have to take the French tests sometime too. I am substantially lower in this language and it might be interesting to see how this would score...
I also see that they have Tagalog as a language they test. I definitely can speak much, much better in Tagalog than I do in either Spanish or French, but I haven't really done that much reading in Tagalog. I haven't really had any trouble reading what I needed to read, but who knows?
The one thing that would stop me from doing a bunch of these tests is that they take quite a bit of time and effort. With the wide scope of the tests, there really isn't anything to study for to get ready, but it does take a lot of effort for a couple of hours to do one.
Anyhow, if a person wanted to test their ability, unofficially and online, in one of the languages that ODA covers, ODA is the best thing I've ever seen.