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Whilst there are studies exploring students' perspectives of assessment, relatively little is known about how Chinese high school students' respond to assessment. Students' perspectives are particularly important because the power of assessment directly impacts on their motivation and attitudes towards schooling. This article explores students' views of English language assessment in a Chinese high school in Hubei province through 'draw-a-picture technique' and subsequent interviews. The main findings show that assessment could invoke both positive and negative feelings; and that tests carried both summative and formative messages. The paper contributes to the understanding of how assessment impacts on students' lives and discusses the use of draw-a-picture technique as a means of documenting students' perceptions.

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It is now a consensus that high-stakes testing exerts powerful impact in controlling curriculum and pedagogy, and shaping students' learning. The power of testing is especially strong in contexts where testing culture prevails. The Chinese educational context is such a context which is dominated by competitive tests. The language testing results from large-scale tests, such as CET-4 (College English Test-Band 4), used to be included as a compulsory prerequisite for undergraduates to get their bachelor's degree. Such a requirement has been removed recently to reduce testing stakes for leverage purposes. Thus, it is worthwhile to investigate whether the change will possibly help to impact students and their learning in a positive way. Our study aimed to explore the impact of changes in the stakes of a language test in the Chinese university context. Data were collected through questionnaires from 544 College English students at a university in northwestern China. Our analysis via SPSS 2.3 showed that test-taking was still well accepted and practiced; while reducing the stakes helped to redirect the students towards English learning, it had less impact on their English learning motivation and approaches. The findings also show that the test-dominated environment that is deep-rooted in the macro-and micro-contexts decided the students' responses to this policy change.