 Name test is called a placement test, often they're also called level tests. As the name implies what we're trying to do is place students in a particular level of class. Some of the more common features of these are that all four skills are commonly tested. That means reading, writing, speaking and listening. They tend to be what's called progressive, and by progressive what we mean is that the questions tend to start easy and gradually become harder and harder. That means that not all students will get to the end of the test and how far they actually get will determine the actual level of the students. If we take a speaking test, for example, we might start off with some very simple things like does the student know the vocabulary for the days of the week? And if they do, can they put today's day into a sentence so they may say something like, OK, today is Wednesday. We can then raise the level of the question and say, all right, if today is Wednesday, can you give me a sentence for yesterday and a sentence for tomorrow? Then we will hopefully be using the past form of is and the future form to find out whether the next level. Once we've done that, we could perhaps check a further grammar point. We could say something like, OK, if I am eating rice, could you tell me what tense this is? If they are able to identify that tense as the present continuous, then can they actually identify each of the parts of speech within that question? If so, we could then give them another sentence of a different tense, for example, present perfect, and see if they can indicate the parts of speech for that one, looking particularly at this new form, the adverb of frequency. That will then give us up to the higher levels, and we can then ask them some general questions to find out whether we think they should be in the intermediate or the upper intermediate groups. So it tends to be progressive, starting easy. The further the students go, the higher the level they are actually at.