Investigating EFL Professor's Conceptions and Practices of Assessment in Moroccan Higher Education

Abstract: Assessment is largely believed to have an indelible importance both as a conception and a practice in higher education, locally and globally, all along with its elemental aspects of designing, administering, and scoring tests. Recently, many Moroccan critical professorial voices have highlighted their dissatisfaction with the inappropriate and ineffective ways these interrelated procedures are being operated, and have strongly called for rethinking and reimplementing them. This study, therefore, sets out to investigate the actual conceptions held and practices manifested by Moroccan university professors in the EFL context by means of a field survey based on Brown’s “teacher’s conceptions of assessment” inventory (TCoA) which covers the fundamental notions of “student accountability”, “school accountability”, “improvement”, and “irrelevance”. To this end, the study, on one hand, provides a synoptic review of previous relevant research to lay a definitional and theoretical framework on the basis of which data analysis will be carried out. On the other hand, this analysis investigates the attitudes and perceptions of Moroccan EFL university professors permanently teaching at eight different Moroccan universities towards actual assessment modes and their implementation. This study is accordingly meant to explore these professors’ testing mode preference, as well as to look at their attitude towards overall purposes of assessment. Key Words: Higher Education, Assessment, EFL, Professors’ Conception