It appears that those who develop tests are not meeting the needs of classroom teachers. The types of tests which have traditionally been used in the classroom are inconsistent with, and in many cases, irrelevant to, the realities of teaching. When tests are designed to be relatively immune to the variations in experience and response that characterize pupils during the instructional experience, teachers tend to not use, trust, or particularly like these tests. Tests should be considered only as one part of the assessment procedure--thus encouraging the development of other ways of helping teachers document, in a better calibrated manner, the many observations which they make in the classroom. (Comparisons between practitioners in medicine and teaching in terms of how, why, and with what degree of trust they utilize tests are made throughout the article). (BH)