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Top1. Introduction
Most universities have language training services that offer students and staff the opportunity to learn a language. In order to access these studies, it requires the performing of a set of tests (Kumaravadivelu, 1994) that allow the level of knowledge of the language that the student would like to study to be determined. Generally, 3 types of tests are performed (Finocchiaro, 1983). An oral test (McKay, 2002) that measures the ability to understand and be understood by a native person, a comprehension test that measures the ability to understand conversations between native people (Rivers, 1981), and a written test (Hadley, 1993) that measures the mastery of the vocabulary and grammatical constructions in the language. Normally the oral test (Lado, 1961) is performed with a teacher from the school, and a multimedia resource such as a video or a recorded conversation is used in the hearing test (Pinto-Llorente, 2016). The written test (Nuttall,1996) usually consists of performing exercises such as writing an essay on a proposed theme, rearranging the components of a sentence in a way that the sentence is correct or completing parts of a phrase that are empty with the most appropriate words (Pinto-Llorente, 2014).
There are several ways to automate level testing (Yang, 2009) that can be classified into specific assessment tools for language or general assessment tools (Squires, 1997). The first case includes tools (Voorheis, 2004) that allow only a particular language to be evaluated. Usually these are not free tools and it is necessary to pay for some kind of license. Its main advantage (Gottliebson, 2010) is the specificity with regard to language, and its disadvantages are the inability to reuse with other languages (Pinto-Llorente, 2015) and its minimum capacities of adaptation and configuration (usually, it is software that cannot be modified; its interfaces offer few options for adaptation and do not usually offer user management services). The second case (Bachmann, 2005) is the use of generic assessment tools that provide the ability to create test with different types of questions (Shohamy, 1988) such as multiple choice, free text, jumbled words. (Abello, 2008). Their main features are: a) They are flexible and adaptable to different contexts (Elbeck, 2014) b) In many cases, they allow the evaluation process to be set (conditional navigation, free navigation.), c) They allow the creation of a repository of questions, and d) It is possible to set the way that the questions are shown (e.g. random presentation of questions and answers). For this type of tools, there are both paid tools and free tools. However, the number of free tools (both online and desktop) is bigger than payment tools. They include, for example forms from Google Drive (Ji, 2015), or QuestionPro tools, thatquiz, testmoz.