My last post reminded me of some advice I’ve given numerous times. Which is that if you are running a large-scale assessment, you should link your free practice material to user accounts. That way you have a never-ending faucet of useful and actionable data.
This is what Duolingo has done all along. Test watchers have noticed they way they stick new types of questions into the practice test now and then. Some of these have later gone on to appear on the actual test. Others have not.
The new 60-minute practice test is just an extension of this. I look forward to taking it.
It is somewhat surprising that the providers of legacy tests aren’t doing this already. I understand that it is easier for Duolingo to do this because most of their questions are machine generated, but if you’ve got access to decades worth of retired test forms you can just rotate through them as needed.