This paper attempts to find the ways to make a direct writing test reliable without reducing its validity.

This article points out the merits and drawbacks of CET writing test from the perspective of features of a good test.

As a comparatively direct measure of learners communicative language ability, writing test claims test reliability and a strong power for predictive utility of test scores and is gaining increasing interest both in practice and research in language testing.

At the same time, how to make English writing test more scientific has been one of the focuses of researchers in recent years.

The past decades has witnessed the refinement of quantitative approaches as well as the emergence of qualitative approaches to writing assessment.

The result of a web-based writing assessment shows inconsistent dispersion of means across different test topics.

As a large-scale test, PETS has attracted and will continually attract much more attention, but there appear no studies of the scoring validity of writing assessment in it now.

This study is undertaken to find out writers attention patterns in these two different writing methods (the direct method and the translation-based method) during the writing process through the think-aloud method and EFL learners perception of the advantages and disadvantages of those two writing methods.