So broadly speaking there are three kinds of assessment, and testing kinda has a place in all 3, but it should never really be the only metric you use.
Initial assessment is what your new students take. This basically tells you roughly where they are and what they need to work on.
Formative assessment is the most crucial part and forms a bulk of the feedback a student gets. Good formative assessment tells the student what skills they've already got the hang of and what they need to work on (and how).
Summarative assessment is the end product. For almost every education system it's a test of some kind. Some are better, some are worse. Open questions are vital to assess a student's analytical or evaluative skills for instance, yet quite often this doesn't happen.
The problem is that if your summarative assessment is a timed test as most of us have experienced, you're no longer just testing ability or knowledge. You're testing how well someone performs under arbitary time pressure.
Summarative assessments essentially then inform every other type of learning and assessment in the course. Teachers have to teach to the test, learners begin to get really good at tests and tests are then made more numerous and harder until you get a weird feedback loop. More and more time is spent prepping for tests and the amount of time spent actually teaching the subject is slowly squeezed out. Initial and formative assessments are now almost totally based on the summarative final assessment because that's basically all you're teaching now. How to pass a test.
This also tends to be amplified by the fact closed questions on assessments are easier (and therefore cheaper) to mark because you still have to pay someone to mark them. Closed questions do not adequately assess if a learner has actually understood the subject.
Of course this also leads to arts and the humanities, subjects you really can't assess using cheap, standardised closed questions, getting pushed out.
Sorry, that accidentally turned into a massive wall of text.
So broadly speaking there are three kinds of assessment, and testing kinda has a place in all 3, but it should never really be the only metric you use.
Initial assessment is what your new students take. This basically tells you roughly where they are and what they need to work on.
Formative assessment is the most crucial part and forms a bulk of the feedback a student gets. Good formative assessment tells the student what skills they've already got the hang of and what they need to work on (and how).
Summarative assessment is the end product. For almost every education system it's a test of some kind. Some are better, some are worse. Open questions are vital to assess a student's analytical or evaluative skills for instance, yet quite often this doesn't happen.
The problem is that if your summarative assessment is a timed test as most of us have experienced, you're no longer just testing ability or knowledge. You're testing how well someone performs under arbitary time pressure.
Summarative assessments essentially then inform every other type of learning and assessment in the course. Teachers have to teach to the test, learners begin to get really good at tests and tests are then made more numerous and harder until you get a weird feedback loop. More and more time is spent prepping for tests and the amount of time spent actually teaching the subject is slowly squeezed out. Initial and formative assessments are now almost totally based on the summarative final assessment because that's basically all you're teaching now. How to pass a test.
This also tends to be amplified by the fact closed questions on assessments are easier (and therefore cheaper) to mark because you still have to pay someone to mark them. Closed questions do not adequately assess if a learner has actually understood the subject.
Of course this also leads to arts and the humanities, subjects you really can't assess using cheap, standardised closed questions, getting pushed out.
Sorry, that accidentally turned into a massive wall of text.