Despite the fact that tests are never tolerated by most students; quizzes, on the contrary, are somehow acceptable owing to their two major most important characteristics:

1. Duration: Short concise tests which take no more than 15 minutes.
2. The limited range of lessons the students are tested on.

            Besides this, there are other features which suit quizzes far more perfectly than any other testing device. I'm making allusion to the fact that they allow students to learn exam practice test material and encourage them to face the challenge of being tested to fight away all the psychological bad effects caused by those traditional long exhausting exams. No intimidation with quizzes, that's true. We may even call them "cognitive games" as funny and simple as that. They serve as a framework for evaluating the backwash effect. Bearing this in mind, we can say without exaggeration that the remarkable effectiveness of quizzes goes further to successfully meet the testing requirements, notably:

• Reliability
• Validity
• Stability
• Backwash
• Markability;

Yet they often lack some "Security" because of their nature. All in all, they own all the good qualities that old test forms have; meanwhile they are void of almost all the frustrations that traditional tests cause.

            I personally think that no one would deny the good contribution of the quizzes to get almost a clear idea about how things go on in the classroom. They make it possible, after all, to correct, to recapture, or to reinforce the shakily learned lessons through exercises and more practice, or simply through remedial work. Thanks to the quizzes, the students could carry on a little bit more confident with their studies and take them more seriously because they are the sort of criteria with which the students as well as the teacher are able to know how well they are progressing.

            Some students may regard them as a measurement of their productive abilities and try to work harder and harder to better their apprenticeship and performance. Moreover, they make the exam paper appealing to the students' acquisitions and not as the exam used to be, a sort of a nightmare. Many of my former students confided that thanks to the few quizzes they have had just before the final exam, the questions on grammar and functions at least seemed so easy that they answered them relaxingly. In this sense, anxiety has been lowered and this is a great gain.

            As for the drawbacks, if there are any, nothing I think can be noticed except that quizzes as a medium of testing are not secure enough. Cheating is something most likely to occur. Furthermore, quizzes are more effective in testing grammar and functions whereas with the other skills it is quite complicated yet not impossible. Testing listening, reading or writing is the most time-consuming par excellence because they deal respectively with linguistic competence and discourse competence. Comprehension, to be reached, the students need to make connections between different parts of the text. So, for the sake of making the learner able to function in real communication it is advisable to combine the comprehension sub-skills, which the quiz, because of its nature couldn't bear. However this is not a real problem. We can forge these skills to fit the quiz.

How ?

            It is not illicit -as a pedagogical practice- to break the comprehension process into separate skills for testing. Thus, each quiz time would be consecrated to a sub-skill: Skimming for gist or scanning for particular information, let's say vocabulary items, for instance; allow the quiz to overcome this defiance. Any other procedure may deprive the quiz from its specificity, as to assign a longer time test, the same genre of tests the students dislike.

            That's on one hand; on the other hand testing writing through a quiz is the most practical for it is quite sufficient to make recourse to "quick write" in which organization, coherence and cohesion, takes the major part of concentration. The quiz however proves able to adopt and adapt all sorts of writing topics such as narrative, descriptive, process, e.g. "How to make a Moroccan tea?" classification, cause-effect, and argumentative to name only a few. At least with the quiz, the students don't seem obliged to write long winding sentences or perpetually repeat the couple of sentences, they master, all the time. The quiz as a valid method of testing writing can fit evaluating the amount of information students grasp from a topic during a reading lesson, a sort of a short summary, a diagram completion or chart filling or what else!.

            In brief, quizzes are of great flexibility. They can meet "all" testing methods and can also be used as an efficient tool to conduct classroom assessment. They can eventually be adapted and extended to better fit all forms of basics to evaluate both teachers and learners' work through students' feedback.

            All in all I don't boast that I have tackled all the different facets of the topic. It is very concise, I admit it, however I didn't mean to give details or even talk about the very personal efforts I made in coining or forging techniques that might have suited quizzes more perfectly; unfortunately most of the time they seemed a little bit not mature enough. I wish I could find ways to limit the defects of security which I don't think hard to do after all.

            Quizzes, to close up this paper, are both economic in time and effort as well as an efficient means to step forward with complete awareness of what is going on in the classroom. They are, we shouldn't deny this, fertile fields for innovation and diversification.

"Learn from the skillful; he that teaches himself has a fool for a master."
Benjamin Franklin

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