The Evaluation of English BAC Examinations in Relation to Short and Long Term Objectives

Abstract

The present study is concerned with the analysis of the Baccalaureate examinations. It aims at contributing to the investigation of the issue of learning objectives and to the improvement of the testing tools in general and BAC examinations in specific It was intended to figure out whether the BAC examinations focus on long or short term learning objectives or on both. To carry out our research, eight English Baccalaureate examinations of Letter and Foreign languages stream were collected and analyzed. Our corpus was selected in a regular way starting from 2007 till 2014. Ninety six (96) activities were examined using a mixed-research method. That is, the study combines between qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, for the interpretation and explanation of the results the present research adopted Hauenstein’s framework concerning learning objectives. The results show that BAC examinations stress more short-term objectives. Indeed, 45.83%of the activities deal with short-term objectives, 25% of them relate to long-term objectives, and 29.17%of the activities involve both short and long term objectives. To improve the BAC examinations by putting stress on long-term objectives, finally, we provided a set of suggestions.