THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TESTING AS A MEANS OF CONTROL IN TEACHING THE DISCIPLINE «FUNDAMENTALS OF ACADEMIC WRITING»

Abstract

With the development of artificial intelligence tools, the question arises about the effectiveness of traditional means of knowledge assessment in teaching many disciplines in higher education institutions. In our work, we analyse the feasibility of online testing as a means of ongoing assessment and diagnosis of knowledge in the discipline «Fundamentals of Academic Writing». In particular, we justify the possibility of using test control to check the degree of mastery of the topic covered and to identify issues that need to be revisited in practical classes. We describe the advantages of the Classtime online platform for conducting such tests: ease of mastering the specifics of working with this service, the ability to create different types of tasks, both open and closed, the ability to check open-ended tasks either manually by the teacher or automatically, the prevention of academic dishonesty through a number of settings, such as shuffling questions and answer options, limiting one login per account, setting strict time limits for the testing session, etc. It should be noted that the last of these methods of preventing academic dishonesty may contradict the provision on taking into account the individual psychological characteristics of students during their studies, as each test taker may perceive and process information at different speeds. Accordingly, students who need more time to understand the questions and think about the correct answers may not be able to complete the test tasks and, as a result, receive fewer points, which leads to a violation of the objectivity of assessment. In this regard, it has been suggested that testing is currently most appropriate as a means of individual assessment of students' knowledge when they are catching up on missed classes