Does responsibility encompass ethicality and accountability in language assessment?

A central conceptual issue in language assessment in general, and in the work of Alan Davies in particular, is never fully resolved. How is responsible language test design related to ethicality? This unfinished business goes back to the unresolved debate about validity and validation, that has resulted in a loss of conceptual clarity about sound language assessment. The contradictions inherent in first declaring validity to be the overarching concept, and then attempting to expand it by promoting other ideas to be the prime considerations, further confuse the issue. This contribution argues that such expansion is unhelpful. A way out is to look at language test design as being responsive to certain typical and general conditions. In that relationship, between the (subjective) making of the test as an artefact that presents us with a response to certain design principles, and the designed object, the actual test itself, lies a potential way out of the impasse.