The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills. The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things. From a teacher's perspective, the evaluation part is entirely a hack to make sure that they do.
> The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills. The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things.
No, both learning and certification of learning (in a way legible to 3rd parties) are real and proper goals of teaching.
I don't think it's true that in all contexts the role of a teacher is exclusively to teach. "Teachers" are also part of a credentialing system used in our society to identify people who are skilled or talented. This is discussed in the article when the author talks about the diffuse harms inflicted by cheaters.
If you have a goal that cannot be evaluated... how do you know if you're achieving it? How do you know if you're improving or worsening?
Evaluation is necessary. It doesn't have to be quantitative, we all know there are infinite problems with purely quantitative measures of human behavior, but evaluation itself is fundamentally part of any goal.
I think this is a crucial point missing in the above discussion.
However, tests should have a place in the teachers perspective, because they improve the learning effect (because they trigger the memory retrieval reliably).
So maybe the problem is simply, that tests are linked to grades ;-)
> So maybe the problem is simply, that tests are linked to grades ;-)
I agree with this. Students cannot afford to get questions wrong and learn from their mistakes. A bad grade can alter a person's future, there's too much at risk.
