Your final paragraph concerns exactly the kind of testing I’m referring to in your first paragraph. Highly specific, context and content driven, and unique to those individuals seeking to prove expertise towards a personal ambition. Perhaps the people who might pay for these hundreds of tests I am talking about are the businesses that so directly benefit from them.

As to the tedium of testing being a kind of lesson embedded in the exam itself, well, as a teacher I am well aware that assessment — especially the standardized kind — is not meant to be instructive.