Assessing Grammar in Online Environment: A Comparison between High and Low Stakes Test Performance

Assessing students’ progress and creating objective and reliable tests occupy an important place in the ELT sphere. This paper focuses on the analysis of the answers provided by a group of undergraduate students majoring in English. They responded to two grammar online tests assessing the knowledge of the verb tenses used in context. The analysis includes the comparison of the results obtained via the low-stakes test comprising fill-in type tasks, on the one hand, and the high-stakes test containing multiple-choice tasks on the other hand. This study aims at exploring which tense-related aspects the students find either the most or least demanding and whether there are similarities or differences in the outcomes gained from two different tests and task types. The findings show that the analyzed answers exhibit similar characteristics regardless of the format and type of testing. The pedagogical implications arising from this study point to the areas which could be improved in terms of specific uses of tenses in context.