Origins of Civic Integration Examination Abroad Thailand
The principles of the current integration policy are included in the Global Agreement of the Dutch cabinet Balkenende II (May 16, 2003). Those who want to settle permanently in the Netherlands must learn the Dutch language and actively participate in Dutch society.
To qualify for a provisional residence permit (MVV), newcomers from Thailand are required to pass an exam, the civic integration examination abroad, at the Dutch Embassy in Bangkok.
Domestic Civic Integration Examination
To qualify for a permit for permanent residence in the Netherlands, another exam has to be passed, the domestic civic integration examination. In December of 2003, a consortium consisting of the CINOP, LTS and Ordinate were commissioned by the Ministry of Justice to develop an exam to assess spoken language skills in Dutch. This test was initially meant for the civic integration examination abroad, but was also developed for use in the domestic civic integration examination.
Due to the specific conditions that were set for this examination, the Ministry of Justice opted for an automated test system based on the Phone Pass technology developed by Ordinate. The Test Spoken Dutch (TGN), that assesses the spoken language skills, is conducted by telephone.
Civic Integration Examination test
The exam candidate must correctly respond to the questions asked by the computer. The responses are processed by a specially developed automatic scoring system, named Phone Pass. This system determines whether the spoken Dutch skills of the exam candidate meet the minimum criteria.
For the civic integration examination abroad, advice has been given regarding the minimum level of Dutch language skills that will be required for the TGN. A new language skill level ‘A1min’ has been defined, which is positioned below the lowest level (A1) as described in the Common European Framework (CEF). You can learn more about the different levels on this website, click on “Explanation of the Score” in the top menu.
Knowledge of the Dutch Society
In the spring of 2004, it was decided that Knowledge of the Dutch Society was to become part of the civic integration examination abroad in Thailand. A computerized test based on the Phone Pass Technology was developed for this purpose.
The exam Knowledge of the Dutch Society (KNS) measures the knowledge an exam candidate has about a predefined set of aspects of the Dutch society. The KNS exam consists of questions asked to the candidate. Based on the auto-detected answers, the system determines if an exam candidate meets the standard of 70% correct answers.
In May of 2005, the Ministry of Justice asked TNO to offer a second opinion as to the validation of the language technology used in the integration exam. This second opinion is based on results of validation studies (not performed by TNO) that were shown to TNO.
The results of the second opinion were stated in a report in October of 2005.
Civic Integration Examination in practice
Whether the quality of the speech is sufficient could not be determined because no quality standards had been set. For this reason, TNO recommended to collect sufficiently representative data for the TGN and the KNS exams, to define success criteria (standards) for these exams, and to revalidate the exams on the basis of this data.
In November of 2005, Minister Verdonk entered into an agreement with Parliament to accept the recommendations of TNO and to test the exams in practice. This practical study was performed as a follow-up study to the second opinion by TNO, and involved the first 500 exam candidates who had passed the civic integration examination abroad. During the study, all exam candidates were reviewed by four human evaluators in addition to the automatic test results. Pending the outcome of the study – to prevent that candidates are disadvantaged – a failed candidate can still succeed if the human score is higher than the machine score. The review process is designed and implemented by the consortium. The review will continue until this TNO-report has been discussed in Parliament. On March 15 of 2006, the Integration Abroad Act (Wib) came into force.
