ONLINE ENGLISH ASSESSMENT FOR FUTURE ENGINEERS: A WORK IN PROGRESS

Prior to COVID-19, as teachers of engineering students mostly bound for the workplace, we had often pondered if traditional reading comprehension exams were a sound indicator of English reading proficiency required by engineers once they began their careers. In addition, admittedly, like many other practitioners, we never particularly enjoyed giving exams, reviewing them, or haggling with the students over points. Traditional exams, in our opinion, had become a locus of tension, often to the detriment of the productive classroom atmosphere created before the exams. Furthermore, traditional exams seem to enforce an unnecessary classroom hierarchy, effectively funneling students through the teacher’s reading of the texts, instead of harnessing the students’ own purpose, experience, knowledge, and logic as a legitimate prism for constructing meaning.

COVID-19 presented an opportunity for change. As we could no longer proctor exams physically, we knew that students would probably devise ways of escaping monitoring, thus rendering such paper and pen exams invalid. This was the push we needed to thoroughly rethink assessment. This talk will discuss our current “testless” alternative assessment methodology, developed with the mindset that English proficiency is a skill that must be constantly built and practiced - not knowledge to be demonstrated on paper. We will present our course-long formative assessment scheme as well as examples of our two summative project assessments, performed in the middle and end of the semester. We hope to stimulate conversation in our community of practice regarding assessment in the age of remote teaching and learning.