Teach English in Bomei Zhen - Shanwei Shi

There are several means of evaluating a student's progress, from testing to tutorials to student evaluations. However, the most common is some form of test, which may or may not be mandated by the school where we teach. Tests can be generally categorized into placement tests, which evaluate which level class a student should placed in, diagnostic tests, which evaluate possible gaps in a student's knowledge, progress tests, which are given periodically to measure students' retention of previously taught material, and practice tests, which help prepare students for external tests. While testing is a necessary part of the teaching progress to see how our students are retaining knowledge, there are different ways of going about it. One of my favorite tests from my undergraduate college experience was one where the professor simply invited each student, one by one, to come into his office and discuss the musicology articles we had been reading recently. He not only was listening for how well we remembered the specifics of the articles, but he also was testing to see if we understood the overall point of the material, seeing the forest for the trees as it were. I thought this was a very organic way of testing knowledge. This goes to show that not every test has to be just a written fill-in-the-blank activity and an essay portion. Especially because we want to evaluate spoken and listening comprehension levels, tests can be creative in their implementation. As long as language level can be fairly clearly measured, even games can become a form of testing. There is much room for creativity, even in the implementation of tests.