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Or you can just have one-on-one oral examinations. Nah, that's a lot of work.

Call it a chat, then. Chatting is perhaps the fastest way to get to know someone and discover what they're interested in. And working with them is the best way to see if they're up to the job.

Testing is unpleasant and it doesn't work anyhow, IMO.

Chatting is also a great way to introduce subjectivity into the examination and provide an advantage to the students you like the best.

And short of "fill in the bubble", any written exam also provides an advantage to the students you like the best.

Testing does work, it's just that the results are of lesser quality. The simpler the testing procedure the less it's error-prone.

Edit: However, there are edge cases where testing could provide more accurate results - for example, a socially-inept person, may be too nervous to talk in person, but could pass the test with a good results.

I don't think testing can measure depth of knowledge, character, creativity or enthusiasm. The reason being that these things simply aren't measurable. They don't come in units.

Depth of knowledge, for example, depends on the connections one forms with other areas of knowledge.

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