Abstract
We investigated the perception of fairness to university entrance examinations when adjustment of participants' test scores is needed. Five hundred fifty nine university freshmen, who took a monitor entrance examination administrated by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations (NCUEE), participated in this study. Participants took an English-listening test under the two following conditions: one is adding environmental and verbal noises (noisy condition) and the other is a control condition. In order to compensate the conditional disadvantages, test scores of participants in a noisy condition were recalculated by the formula based on the control condition's scores. After the test, all participants were asked to fill out the questionnaire about how they feel about adjusting the test scores of the noisy condition. The overall results showed that most participants positively accepted the fact that the test scores of the noisy condition were adjusted, while some still felt the adjustment was not fair. Therefore, test administrators have to be careful when they need to adjust test scores. Second, we found that the participants with high test scores were more likely to accept the score adjustment than those with low scores. However, there was no significant difference between the two experimental conditions.
