Actually, I am a convert to the frequent assessment approach for the reasons indicated in Bostonian's article and HowlerKarma's post. For a few years, I was exasperated and felt bad for my kids until I realized that being accountable most days had resulted in development of superior learning, performance and executive functioning skills.
Personally, I would have had a hard time under this approach, but I also believe it would have forced me to become a better student before college. It was a dangerous habit for me to be able to tune out in class, skip most of the daily work and simply cram the night before to ace exams and therefore the courses in high school.
Furthermore, in many of DS/DD's classes, the big unit assessments tend to be mostly basic material not meant to challenge and generally not difficult to ace. The daily work, on the other hand, fell into two distinct categories. Most often, they were basic questions/problems to confirm understanding. Sometimes, however, they were extensions/applications meant to challenge the students, which also allows the teacher to distinguish the high ability students. However, since these challenging assignments are low-value (5-10 points), it is still very possible for hard-working conscientious students to get an "A" even if they fell short of these challenges.
