In this era of communicative language teaching, tests should be measure up to standards of authenticity and meaningfulness. Tests should be design to serve as motivating learning experiences rather than anxiety-provoking threats.
The main characteristic of tests is it should deliver a positive experiences to the students and also build their confidence and become a learning experiences. Another things is tests should bring out the best in students and it shouldn 't be artificial and anxiety-provoking.
While language assessment aims to create more authentic and motivating assessment procedures that are appropriate for their context & designed to offer constructive feedback to students. Main factors that has to be considered while preparing a language assessment is the purposes of the assessment and whether the test items serve to the purpose. This is where reliability and validity come in. Reliability in assessment measure the consistency and dependability of the test items where as validity is measure what it is supposed to assess. Every assessment must be reliable in order to be valid.
Authentic assessment as defined by Bachman ( 1991) is a three alternate approaches that have been taken with regard to authenticity in testing. While another understanding for authentic assessment is that it refers to assessment tasks that resemble reading and writing in the real world and in school (Hiebert, Valencia & Afflerbach, 1994; Wiggins, 1993). There is two different type of testing