Teachers. When will we change our old fashioned evaluation system?

Dear colleagues: 

Just the word “quiz” makes students trigger all their alarms. The stress is so much that in many cases they forget everything they had reviewed, lose self confidence and sometimes panick. I remember once giving an oral test to a university girl and then she started sweating so much that her face and arms were totally wet and her hands were shaking. She confessed she was extremely nervous, so I told her to go to the cafeteria for a drink and relax for a while before trying again.

Decades ago some teachers started talking about the necessity of changing the way we managed  the evaluation of our students process. Not only in languages but in all subjects. The big problem is that no matter how many wise theories about evaluation, at least in my country, it hasn´t changed very much. The educational systems have been evaluating the student progress with tests than only ask for information, so if the student can’t recall it as it is in the books, the he/she fails.

That’s also the cause that produces students passing tests without really learning. It happens in elementary schools, secondary schools and university sometimes. As a consequence, they get certificates and diplomas and this way, many professionals start their real learning and development of competences, once they are working and have experiences.

Engineers finish university and get jobs where they don’t use the theoretical math they learned at University, they just sit at desks and become managers. They should  have been trained for that. Lawyers get jobs as judges and only then they start learning to their job. They didn’t learn that at the university.

Who is going to make administrators change their minds about managing evaluation in schools and universities? When we get job as teachers, we have to do as it has been stablished by the administrators and they have kept it going like that since always. They are reluctant to change. Good reasons haven't been enough. 

Presently our evaluation system continues the same no matter all that has been said about evaluating competences, ability to do things in a context. In most cases, tests only measure capacity to recall information previousy presented.

However, we can have some autonomy to assess our students differently, for example to evaluate activities in the classroom (oral or  written  production, skits, videos, posters, etc.  And that's a good begining for a change. PBL is definitely the best way to evaluate the capacity of our students to do positive,  meaningful and useful things with the information they have gathered along their course.