ABSTRACT:While there have been minor but bitterly debated issues connected with variety choice in international teaching and testing of English, an equally pervasive cultural clash has been initiated through the encounter between the traditional and modern approaches to testing. The classical colonial diffusion of the British examination system (with its notion of prescribed curriculum and the judgement by examiners of written or spoken performance) has come into unfruitful rivalry with the neo‐colonialist American objective test (with its deification of reliability and the unquestionable expertise of psychometrists); at the same time, the prodicious power of the tests has supported the imperialism of the competing normative varieties of English they revere and disseminat