High School Teachers and Students’ Perceptions of Online Assessment in EFL Classroom

Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the shift towards online teaching and learning platforms has undeniably gained popularity in the EFL context. Emerging from this trend, online assessment has attracted considerable attention from several researchers, teachers, and students. This study set out to identify high school teachers and students' perceptions of online assessment and the challenges they have faced while doing the assessment virtually. 10 EFL teachers and 200 students from different public high schools in Hanoi, Vietnam were involved in the research. All of them first completed the questionnaire in the form of a Likert scale survey through Google forms to provide information on their perceptions of online assessment. Interviews with 5 teachers and 10 students were then conducted via Skype to explore the troubles facing them in assessing online. Results from these two sources of data indicated that both high school teachers and students showed positive attitudes towards online assessment in terms of its flexibility of assessment and improvement of learners' autonomy. However, challenges encountered in online assessment have not gone unnoticed. It was revealed that teachers' serious challenges in assessing students online lay in a lower level of interaction and a higher risk of cheating and technical issues. On the other hand, most students found this assessment platform difficult as they were unfamiliar with using technology and experienced anxiety in online English tests under time constraints. These negative effects of online assessment should be taken into great account to inform both future teaching and learning practices.