What's wrong with traditional math assessment?

Ever since my first experience as "the teacher" in a classroom I've always felt uncomfortable with the way we traditionally assess math. The traditional unit exam breeds last minute cramming and memorization of procedures and questions by the student. This is followed by an all to common brain dump of useless information (i.e. math content) about 10 seconds after they hand in their exam. There must be a better way. Now after reading a post from a student on Students 2.0 it seems as though some of the students feel the same way!

Students 2.0 via kwout

Could this be the sparks of something new burning in the future of teaching and assessing of mathematics?
Personally, as I went through my university career I learned that I would never memorize all the questions that could be asked or all the different scenario's that I could possibly encounter, but what I could do is understand the principles and key ideas underlying all the questions and thus be able to apply those understandings to whatever I faced on the exams. Ironically enough it took less time to study this way then it did when I tried to do one of every type of question I might face. This discovery didn't come until about my second year of university, which was preceded by my k-12 schooling, two years at a technology school, and a year of university classes...oh the wasted hours memorizing and agonizing over all the information to take in.
Now with this new found outlook and a desire in our students to want to be tested more meaningfully I feel the time is now for something new to develop. There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Wiggins & McTighe have a great book out called, Understanding by Design, that explains this idea and how we can design our teaching and assessing to facilitate understanding. Closely related to this is the idea of Bloom's Taxonomy, which was published back in the 50's but wasn't very popular until recently. The idea is to get students to think about the content (no matter what it is) and to bend it, twist it, shape it, and make it fit into scenario's, contexts, and applications that differ from what they have seen it in before. Basically we are looking for the student to demonstrate the ability to transfer knowledge across into other areas or applications.
In math this may come about as problem solving, projects, presentations, or research into real life applications. I have found one great resource on the net that has a collection of great higher level mathematical thinking objectives involved in the assessment tasks. It was put together by Harvard graduates from 1993 to 2003 (a fairly credible source, don't you think?). Here is the link.
So as I make my way through this crazy world of teaching I learn from the past, refuse the status quo of the present, and anticipate change for the future of education.