The present article addressed the issue of university teachers' working experience in the field of class-oriented online teaching English in higher educational institutions. The central aim of this study was a detailed description of the system for assessing reading skills utilized in English proficiency tests (CAE (C1), TOEFL, IELTS), as well as a comprehensive analysis of testing results. As a part of a thorough investigation, the article detailed three major reading modes and tasks most commonly used in such tests (scan-reading, skim-reading, and in-depth reading). Besides, in order to obtain reliable conclusions about the reasonability of the test tasks, the study took into account the tests' duration, the number and types of tasks, as well as the length of reading passages proposed. The research population comprised 622 second-year students from all faculties of the