抄録
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has announced the university admission reforms and most of the applicants will take the new Common Test and/or private-sector English tests. The present study investigated the characteristics of each of the tests and compared them with the Center Test, the current test for university admissions. The findings showed that there was a significant difference of the proportion of question types between the tests; some tests include more paraphrase questions, while other tests include more higher-level questions, which were inference questions, theme questions, and text organization questions. Moreover, the average number of the words in choices differed significantly between the tests. The average number of the words included both in choices and texts also differed significantly, which suggests that the item difficulty in multiple-choice reading tests is different between the tests. These results suggest that the reading ability which applicants are required to achieve certain score is different between the tests, and therefore, different test-taking strategies may be useful for different tests, such as a word-matching strategy.
https://ror.org/00khh5r84 
