As pointed out above, the teacher's role should not be that of the informant, but she should be the expert pedagogue. A vast majority of teachers around the globe are real professionals. The snag is they are experts on yesterday's four-walled classroom methodology. That is why it is utterly important that schools spend money on creative and experimental in-service training for their staff. With the introduction of computers in education we run the risk of going back 30 years in the field of assessment and general testing.
Computers make it is very simple to create multiple choice tests and process data.
The assessment process runs the risk of being broken up into small snippets. Communicative competence or social science, for example, must not be reduced to snippets. We are definitely not totally against multiple choice tests. But they should be used for the right purposes, and should not be allowed to replace competence tests such as oral and written reports, analyses, interviews and other communicative forms of assessment. Assessing a student should be a continual process.