4.1.1 Students’ comments on the existing tests
Figure 1 presents the students’ accomplishment of a test. It can be seen that only 7%
can complete from 80% to 100% of the test while 40% can accomplish from 20% to 50% and even up to 17% can only do from 0% to 20% even though they have learnt English for many years. The following chart will show their accomplishment of the test clearly:
Figure 4.1: Students’ accomplishment of a test
Not many students can accomplish 100% of the test because they have some difficulties in doing it. 17% find it difficult to deal with phonetics, 43% have difficulty with many different types of test items. 33% and 37% have problems with vocabulary and grammatical structures respectively.
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Figure 4.2: Students’ difficulty/ difficulties when doing the test
When being asked about their comments on the current test, 67% show their interest in reading and answering questions while only 20% are interested in making up sentences using the prompts and 33% like correcting the mistakes. Many students think that reading and answering questions is easy for them to get marks because the answers can be found in the texts. However, they think that making up sentences using the prompts or correcting the mistakes that require a good knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary are difficult.
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Figure 4.3: Students’ interests in test items 4.1.2 Students’ opinions towards the improvement of the tests
Even though not many students can complete all parts of the test, only 30% want to change the format of the current test. On the one hand, a number of students (43%
and 87%) want to add time and marking scale in each part so that they can control the time and know the exact points for each one. On the other hand, a lot of students think that it is not necessary to add the time to each part because they don’t want to pay too much attention to the time and get time pressure.
Figure 4.4: Students’ comments and suggestions
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All the teachers at QNTTC English Faculty have taught non-English majors for at least three years so they all made the final achievement tests for them. However, none of them used a complete test from a test book because a complete test from a test book is not completely suitable for their students. Two teachers (20%) usually made their own tests because other tests may not suitable for their objectives. Up to 60% took a complete test from a test book and then adapted it to make it suitable for their students so they can not only save time but also make suitable tests for their students. Only 20% do not use a complete test from a test book or make their own test but use difference sources in order to make their tests more reliable and more interesting .
Figure 4.5: Teachers’ making the English achievement test
All of the teachers have ever made at least one final achievement test, however, none of them thought that they were very reasonable. 50% found them not very reasonable and some of them even thought they were not reasonable at all (10%) because the current tests had no requirement of writing an essay or a letter that is necessary for them to do a test based on the CEFR. Besides this, the current test only tested students’ reading and writing skills. Only 40% thought that non-English majors wouldn’t use English in their future job so the current tests were reasonable.
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Figure 4.6: Teachers’ attitudes toward the current test
The teachers had different opinions when being asked to give the comments on the current test. In terms of marking scale, nearly all of them found it reasonable and only 10% thought it was not very reasonable because some test items were more difficult than the others. When considering the time allowance, none of them found it very reasonable or unreasonable. 70% and 30% thought that it was reasonable or not very reasonable respectively.
Figure 4.7: Teachers’ comments on the current test
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4.1.4 Teachers’ opinions towards the improvement of the tests
With the questions whether they would like to change the current test, the results are not the same for the three aspects. 70% indicated their wishes to change the content of the test while 30% thought that the content was good and didn’t want to change.
Most teachers thought that the tests should be reconstructed so that they covered all aspects of English as well as everything that the students learnt. With the marking scale, 70% agreed to change the marking scale because the marks should depend on the format of the tests or the students’ level. However, 30% have no wish to change the marking scale because they think that in their real testing situation, students usually got the right answers for the multiple-choice items and the current tests at QNTTC have more multiple-choice test items. 40% were satisfied with the time allowance for the test and they found that 60 minutes for 40 items (in which there are 20 multiple-choice items) were reasonable. Up to 60% agreed to change it because they thought that too much time made students unfocused on the tests or let students have time to copy.
Figure 4.8: Changes?
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