Author Jonathan Howland writes here that he is hardly the first to suggest that much of the testing going on in the educational system today appears dumb. The tidal change that brought schools the Common Core standards is a maneuver born of an admission: educators took their eye off the ball, testing for too much of the wrong thing--thin skills rather than thick understanding, familiarity and facility rather than synthesis and application. The Common Core purports to reorient educators to teach (and measure) more conceptual learning and "transfer." Howland introduces an alternative concept called assessment for learning. He argues that the concept demands something fresh of teachers and students alike. When students must utilize multiple faculties and facilities in the service of creating something, dutifully "doing school" no longer suffices. In assessment for learning, the sweat, enthusiasm and, yes, anxiety that traditional testing and exam taking engender are leveraged and amortized. Rather, the learning takes a form pasted with students' fingerprints: their individual understanding and sustained engagement, but also their aesthetic, imagination, and honest commitment. Howland describes what Assessment for Learning involves, and explains how the process looks in practice.