Assessment is the part of teaching I enjoy least: but it's essential. Within the course, you do it so that you and the students can be aware of how you and they are doing, and what needs further work. And at the beginning or end of the course, it's done for external reasons: for placement in an appropriate level class, as a basis for formal certification, for employment, and so on.

• 83 Assess not only through tests

• 84 Use (also) student self-assessment

• 85 Use tests as a teaching tool

• 86 Add optional sections to tests

• 87 Prepare students for the test

• 88 Assess yourself

83 Assess not only through tests

Tests as an assessment tool are convenient to administer, usually straightforward to check and grade and provide a single clear result. They will therefore probably continue to be used in most institutions, and in most contexts where the stakeholders (an education authority or the institution, for example) require a clear – usually numerical – assessment of how good at English a particular student is. They’re also used to support ongoing teaching (formative assessment): to find out what students know and don't know at a particular point. The main aim in this case is to raise both students’ and teachers’ awareness of the students’ level, and to help the teacher decide what needs to be focused on in the future.

They do, however, have disadvantages which we need to be aware of. For example, the test itself may not be well designed, and may not give reliable results; students with test anxiety may under-perform; any specific test may or may not include language that the students happen to know, or topics they are familiar with.

So use other sources of evaluation as well, preferably ones that enable you to check students’ performance periodically as the course goes on rather than only at a single point. For example:

• • Note down for yourself occasionally your impression of the classroom performance of individual students. It only takes a minute or two on your computer at the end of the day. Over time you’ll find that you’ve made notes on most of them.