In the comments of this question I askeda, an interesting point was raised in an exchange between two users:
When teaching the language, you have to say which answer is gonna get accepted in the FCE or TOEFL or whatever equivalent in whatever language. Or what kind speech csn be used by news anchors in BBC or CNN so that the viewers can actually understand what they are saying.
In light of the above, I started to think how exactly do these institutions frame these language test when there are no hard and fast rules to check what is allowed or disallowed in a language? On an intuitive level, it's easy to distinguish between speakers who are understandable and not, but on the highest level , how could one consistently assign a rating to people's English objectively?
