DLI Suspends DLPT 5

Why am I not surprised. The test was off-the-charts hard, according to many of my students who were 3/3 linguists in the past and scored 1+ on the new test. These were not ordinary students. They have years of experience working with Arabic material much harder than the DLPT and have very exceptional communicative ability.

I believe that DLI needs to do a more thorough job at validation. It has taken me 2 years so far to validate questions for my two upcoming books for Farsi and Iraqi Arabic, so I know how big of a challenge it is (each of my books contains over 400 questions while the DLPT has a total of 128 for both segments.).

Here is a link to the official memorandum suspending the test.