Rate My Professor Ute Knoch

Professor Ute Knoch is a Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, serving as Director of the Language Testing Research Centre (LTRC). She earned her PhD in Language Teaching and Learning from the University of Auckland, where she also completed her Master's degree. Her doctoral research focused on the development and validation of a rating scale for diagnostic writing assessment, forming the basis of her book Diagnostic Writing Assessment published by Peter Lang in 2009.

Knoch's research specializations include assessing languages for academic and professional purposes, policy and language assessment, validation in language assessment, rater-mediated assessment, and placement testing. She has authored or co-authored influential books such as Fairness, Justice and Language Assessment (2019, Oxford University Press, with Tim McNamara and Jason Fan), Assessing English for Professional Purposes: Language and the workplace (2020, Routledge, with Susy Macqueen, recipient of the ILTA/Sage best book award for language testing publications between 2017-2020), and Scoring second language spoken and written performances (2021, Continuum, with Jin Yan and Judith Fairbairn). Her extensive publication record, with over 8,400 citations on Google Scholar, covers topics like rating scale validation, fairness in testing, workplace language competence, and rater training. Notable papers include 'Diagnostic assessment of writing: A comparison of two rating scales' (2009), 'The relative effectiveness of different types of direct written corrective feedback' (2009), and 'Test score comparison tables: How well are they serving test users?' (2024).

Throughout her career at the University of Melbourne since 2007, Knoch has held key leadership positions, including Co-president of the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand (ALTAANZ) from 2015-2016 and current Vice-President, as well as membership on the Executive Board of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) from 2011-2014 and 2017-2019. She has received prestigious awards such as the TOEFL Outstanding Young Scholar Award from the Educational Testing Service (2014), the Thomson Reuters Women in Research citation award (2016), the ILTA Language Assessment Advocacy Award (2020, with Tim McNamara and Cathie Elder), and the Reviewer of the Year award from the journal Language Testing (2020). Her work has significantly influenced language testing practices, particularly in ensuring fairness, validity, and policy alignment in high-stakes assessments.