Until last year I had had the pleasure of working with a group of extra-curricular, but (or precisely therefore?) very motivated students. Our cooperation began four years ago and they were then in the 6^th form elementary, true beginners. We had two 45 minute classes a week and they ended up (depending on the student) at the Pre-Intermediate\Intermediate level. Classes were lively, with a strong emphasis on students’ generated materials and activities, although we “used” a course book throughout, to provide the students with the “anchor of safety” they felt necessary.

In the final year the students chose a coursebook (“Enterprise”). Asked for reasons, they named two foremost: an attractive look with seemingly interesting topics plus a well-organised grammar part. All that year they kept harping on about the necessity to “learn and revise grammar”, in spite of (or possibly because of) the generally successful level of communicative competence. They adored complicated and lengthy games for Warm-up, often taking up to half an hour of the class – with no protest from me, as their games provided all the elements of a balanced approach: multi-topical quizzes or “wheel of fortune” types of games, with some tasks checking the language structure competence of the participants.

With all that, I soon perceived that conducting tests in the class is a sheer waste of time – so valuable, so scarce and so well employed in the service of perfecting their language fluency. Therefore I explained to them the concept of “Take-Away, Self-Service” tests – being traditional tests with an answer key and the evaluation scale provided. They could conduct their own testing at home, check and calculate… plus write their own analyses of the test results.

The first reaction of the group was largely unfavourable. It was not a refusal on the ground of the principle, but an expression of their doubts whether the task was not beyond their abilities. When questioned closer, among the most common verbalized responses was: “What if I cheat and check the answers before?”. This proved to be a good opening point for a discussion about the reasons for learning and the significance of marks as the means of evaluation.

Eventually the group agreed to trust my opinion: that they were mature enough to conduct their own evaluation, especially in the case of tests where there were no ambiguity as to the correct answer. The argument which tipped the scales was of a purely practical nature: that we could use the class time for other, more creative activities.

With the first batch of corrected tests came short analyses of the results. Some students enclosed a description of the circumstances under which the test had been conducted (time of day, place, duration, exceptional events like the interruption by a younger sister seeking assistance in her own homework etc.). Most of them remembered to time their “testing session” according to the instruction given in the heading of the test. I could not fault the analyses – mostly they excelled in precision in pin-pointing the “weak spots”, a fair percentage included the suggestion of the reason for the particular failure and some students went so far as to work out a schedule of remedial work.

The next test was conducted in the traditional manner, that is in the class and checked/evaluated by the teacher. Then we had another discussion, where the students were invited to compare the benefits and limitations of each method. In spite of several valid arguments in favour of tests conducted in the class (absence of interruptive factors, atmosphere more conducive to solving test problems, better supervision over timing) ther majority emphasized the beneficial influence of the lack of stress. Although, to be fair, there was evidence brought in to prove that a testing situation cannot be virtually stress-free: students described “another kind” of anxiety, more internalized, but by no means less real or impinging on the quality of the academic performance.

Obviously this procedure has its inherent limitations. It should not be used where the group is not yet ready to take the responsibility for their evaluation or where the learning\teaching process is happening within the framework of institutionalized education, where graded certificates outweigh in importance the learning itself – the perfecting of a skill or gathering knowledge. Moreover, it would be unfair to the students to ask them to conduct an evaluation of open-type tasks. Since, however, multiple-choice tests or gap clozes have become a widespread tool for checking language proficiency, especially in the field of language structures, even such limited use has its merits. Not the least is the benefit to the overworked teacher who can devote the time to prepare classes or – as several times in case of the described group – gain time for personal counseling sessions, discussing the student’s progress, conducted on the basis of the individually prepared projects and the aforementioned tests.

Moreover, I am sure that the experience of checking and evaluating tests of linguistic proficiency on their own will be for our students a meaningful stage in the process of development of an autonomous personality. Granted, one of the group came to me some weeks ago and, looking at me provocatively, sighed: “The high school is so cosy… we don’t have to worry about independence, everything is decided for us. No way we could check our own tests!”. But it was easy to detect a note of regret in the cocky manner. Later on the same person said: “Too much supervision can squash your soul”.

I guess this is as good a closing phrase as any other.