Abstract:

The Ural Federal University requires incoming freshmen to take English Placement Test (EPT) to assess their knowledge and skill. The results of the EPT help the university teachers to identify students who need introductory course, remedial assistance, or proficient course. The paper reports on the experience of Ural Federal University to transform paper-based placement test into online multi-modal system. The test is to be done under student’s personal account on a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone online at home.The test traditionally consisted of two parts, use of English and listening tasks, followed by oral interview in class. The results of the test itself showed that only 58,8% of students were adequately evaluated and assigned an appropriate level according to Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), with 33,1% students being overestimated and 8,1% underestimated. We conducted a survey to find out what factors contributed to low accuracy and imperfection. The main reasons turned out to fall into three groups. The first includes technical problems with personal account and logging in. The second group deals with the time of the day the test was done, availability and access to reference materials from home, low students’ motivation which resulted in ignoring some tasks. The third one concerns the test construct, i.e. poor task design, inefficiency of listening tasks. The results give us some ground to modify and enhance the existing test tasks, specify the instructions and provide campus facilities for doing the test online.

Keywords:

English placement test, online education, CEFR.