The paper argues that contemporary test validity theory places the consequences of testing on the lives of all college applicants at the back of the test validation argument. It introduces the notion of test efficacy as a process to gather evidence on claims on consequences of testing on all college applicants that can be traced back to validity.…

England has a 'pre-qualification' system of higher education admissions, where applications and offers are made to young people before exam results are received. While in most cases offers are conditional on achieving a grade target in A Level exams, recent years have seen an exponential growth in 'unconditional offers', where the offer of a place…