IELTS makes use of both expert judgments by academic staff from the target domainand empirical approaches to match the test tasks with the target domain tasks, and toachieve high construct representativeness and relevance. Moore and Morton (1999), for example, compared IELTS writing task items with 155 assignments given in twoAustralian universities. They found that IELTS task 1 was representative of the TLUcontent while IELTS task 2, which require students to agree or disagree with the proposition, did not match exactly with any of the academic genres in the TLU domainas the university writing corpus was based on external sources as opposed to IELTStask 2, which was based on prior knowledge as a source of information. IELTS task 2 was more similar to non-academic public forms of discourse such as letter to the editor;however, IELTS task 2 could also be considered close to the genre “essay”, which wasthe most common of the university tasks (60 %). In terms of rhetorical functions, themost common function in the university corpus was “evaluation” parallel to IELTS task 2. As a conclusion, it was suggested that an integrated reading-writing task should beincluded in the test to increase authenticity. Nevertheless, IELTS’ claims are based onthe investigation of TLU tasks from only a limited context—UK and Australianuniversities; thus, representativeness and relevance of the construct and meaningfulnessof interpretations in other domains are seriously questionable.