Education absolutely requires assessment, it doesn't require grades that can later be used against you though. Without assessment you have absolutely no clue how well you understand the material, especially in relation to other people in the class.
Remember these are college classes, it's not rote memorization anymore, you usually have to use some type of analysis to get to the right answer on a college exam.
My argument was implicitly about formalized assessment where anti-cheating measures are required.
Even so, most researchers and independent learners are quite capable of gauging their own understanding without any external testing or assessment.
And when people attend lectures simply out of curiosity they can become educated entirely without assessment.
I do not undervalue testing, if anything I would endorse all classes using brief informal testing on a weekly or even daily basis.
But I am opposed to the misuse of testing as metrics for performance. An effective test is one where people make plenty of mistakes, otherwise not much learning is happening.
Education absolutely requires assessment, it doesn't require grades that can later be used against you though. Without assessment you have absolutely no clue how well you understand the material, especially in relation to other people in the class.
Remember these are college classes, it's not rote memorization anymore, you usually have to use some type of analysis to get to the right answer on a college exam.
My argument was implicitly about formalized assessment where anti-cheating measures are required.
Even so, most researchers and independent learners are quite capable of gauging their own understanding without any external testing or assessment.
And when people attend lectures simply out of curiosity they can become educated entirely without assessment.
I do not undervalue testing, if anything I would endorse all classes using brief informal testing on a weekly or even daily basis.
But I am opposed to the misuse of testing as metrics for performance. An effective test is one where people make plenty of mistakes, otherwise not much learning is happening.