This highlights some important questions.
Good assessment ensures effective learning and provides timely feedback.
It is an essential component of good teaching and must be recognised and rewarded. Poor assessment sees students set infrequent, unseen tests in unfamiliar formats, or loads them with tasks occupying many hours of effort, without feedback, for a minimal reward, often at an intensity that precludes them from other activities. Content knowledge is important in any discipline, but more crucial is the capacity to use and apply that knowledge. Recall of facts in an artificial examination situation is easy to test, but often of dubious validity. There are now agreed generic skills that define a graduate of the University of Sydney, yet many assessments do not address them.