My Spanish girl friend and I studied English vocabulary to prepare for the GRE, and took many old-fashioned paper based tests (non-adaptive) for practice, then later the actual (adaptive) one. Her result on the actual test was much worse than on the practice tests, by many standard deviations (only in the verbal section, not in the quantitative section).
Now, in English, the more difficult words are frequently the words of Latin origin (for example, "to lament" vs "to mourn"). However, those were often cognates of the equivalent Spanish words, thus easier for her. So, the hypothesis is that she got some questions wrong initially, and the algorithm decided to give her "easier" questions (with more Germanic words), which would be harder for her, though; while withholding the harder questions which she could have solved correctly.
Intriguingly, it might have gone the other way around (depending on whether you first got predominantly Germanic words, answered them wrong, and got even more of them, or first got predominantly Latinate words, answered them correctly, and got even more of them.)
Thus, if ETS tested the adaptive algorithm on native English speakers, the adaptive test might have lined up very well with the traditional test, validating it.
(Now we're coming to the intriguing part.) If they tested it also with Latinos/native Spanish speakers, it might well have been that the mean deviation (between adaptive and paper based result) was also very small, but the variance of the deviation larger: many large deviations to the upside, many large deviations to the downside.
I wonder whether that was ever researched in depth, and whether it could have been grounds for complaints (that members of some community had measurements that were "worse", but not in the sense of biased, but of "less precise", with more variance!)?
Yes, it was. My wife studied linguistics and she has an MSc in Education, she has tens of books on grading and evaluating English learners, and GRE is a test that has been studied extensively. I don't have any reference at hand (on my mobile) but feel free to search on any education-related journal: you'll find tons of sudies.
Orwell (1946)
Note that the Rohirrim alliterate, for example (they're saxons!), and the elves don't.
Nowadays, English occupies a similar position in much of the world — if you study a scientific or engineering discipline in a non-English-speaking part of the world, chances are excellent that you will also have to study English in order to read the literature in the field. To take an example you've worked on yourself, GCC's comments are in English, and so is the mailing list.
So it's quite common for people to use English loanwords in, for example, Spanish when discussing computers, video games, and so on.
I know Latin was the language of science (later German until the late 1910s) as French was in diplomacy, but the contemporary significance of the use of latinate words is more of an English thing IMHO -- certainly more than in romance countries like Spain! There are some use of latinate endings in loan words in German but technical jargon (e.g. legal language) tends to simply be complex German words.
I gave long found it odd that English went through a phase of using Latin or Greek roots to construct a new word (e.g. television) while most people use their own language (e.g. Fernseh). Or jarringly, combine the two (e.g. "monolingual" -- yech)
http://anglisztika.uni-eger.hu/public/uploads/orsi-2015_576c...
which among other things points out that words like "beef" and "mutton" don't appear in English until centuries after the Conquest.
Same with a cow being turned into "ox-meat" (krowa -> wołowina) and sheep -> "ram-meat" (owca -> baranina).
"Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, "
Similarly, for (modern) Greeks a lot of opaque medical jargon that baffles most of us must be more or less plain speaking to them.
Added: Well at least the script is available
[0]: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/03e329e9cec8ad456...