Issues in Applied Linguistics

The Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC) is a minimal competency test which students must pass to graduate from high school. This paper focuses on differences in HSTEC (Form G) performance between 300 ninth grade students of limited English proficiency (SLEP) and the 318 ninth grade students used in the original norming sample (NORM group). The analyses indicate that SLEP students form a distinctly separate population from the NORM group (F = 206.21, p < .01) with SLEP students scoring 26.14 points lower than the NORM group on average. At the same time, those subtests which the SLEP students found to be more difficult were correspondingly difficult for the NORM group. Though there were no significant differences found among the various SLEP group ethnicities, there were significant differences among the HSTEC subtests and for interactions between ethnicity and the subtests. The results are discussed in terms of language training that some of the SLEP students should receive so that they can demonstrate their true abilities on the HSTEC.