The passage looks to be a part of literary piece and it is written in past tense

Test Specification

The tester’s first step involves careful preparation of test specification. He should specify all the writing tasks mentioned in the syllabus. They must be accompanied with the themes used relevant topics and text types. He should also list out the underlying skills practiced in each task. It is useful to indicate the proportion of all these elements as found in the syllabus.
There are several important sub-skills of writing. Grammatical skill is usually the main skill associated with writing. This tests the candidate’s ability to produce grammatical sentences. These sentences should include subordination and co-ordination appropriately and effectively. This ability must be given due proportion in allocating marks. Apart from that, organizational skill must also be measured. This tests the candidate’s ability to select, order and logically organize information to produce a coherent text. In writing stylistic skill too is sometimes included in syllabus. This tests his ability to be sensitive to the particular reading audience: for example, the style and language of a personal letter differs considerably from that of a formal letter. According to the level of students, some writing course may emphasize mechanics of writing such as punctuation, capitalization etc in different degrees. The tester must clearly define what skills are included in what proportion. The tasks to be included in the test paper must reflect this choice of sub-skills and the allocation of marks should be done according to this proportion.
Once the tasks and sub-skills are identified, the tester should make a principled selection of test tasks to represent major themes, sub-skills, etc.

3. 
   Eliciting language
   

The main concern of the tester is to set writing tasks which elicit samples of writing that truly represent candidates’ ability. If the test item requires the candidate to write one sentence about himself (This is also a writing task!), will it represent true writing ability of the individual? So is the case if only one paragraph is needed.
Therefore, eliciting sufficient language is challenging. The tester must set as many tasks as possible, but he should be sensitive to practical constraints.
Each new task must be given a fresh start. If test items are related, performance of one task may affect the other one too.
The test tasks should test only the writing ability and nothing else. For example, if candidates are required to develop an essay on American life style, some candidates are put at an advantage. This will also test the general knowledge of the candidates. Some test items require candidates to demonstrate their creativity and imagination. In fact, creativity is important in writing and should be encouraged in classroom teaching. But merely because a candidate is creative, if he scores a better mark, the tester has not elicited language appropriately to assess his writing performances. In other words, every candidate must be able to produce sufficient content in each writing task without taking too much of conscious effort to collect data. Obviously, biased topics such as those based on religion must be avoided.

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