tests of English

[Jaime]

Hi there,
I'm a teacher of English as a foreign language and at the school I work for we've been taking some examinations for some few years at certain levels.
9th graders take the SLEP test, that's the highest we got, but we'd like to add one more for our 12th graders, at the end of their school process, in order to see if there is any evolution and we think that applying the same examination is not going to show us the required results we need to know. I've heard of many tests, PET, KET, First Certificate and so on and so forth. Could anybody help me in telling me the order of complexity of all the tests so I could choose the best one for our students? I know that 1st Cert. is too high for us, for example.
What about the others? What do they measure: Reading, Listening, Writing, Speaking? How complex are these ones? (Mentioned or not in here)
Thanks a lot for your help.
Jaime

[Jamie (K)]

My understanding is that First Certificate measures some kind of intermediate English, so it stops lower than the TOEFL. The TOEFL test, the MTELP, and ESL Compass measure people from beginners all the way up to near-native-speaker accuracy.

[Torsten]

Another good choice is the TOEIC test since it measures low intermediate learners to advanced speakers.

TOEIC listening, photographs: Relaxing