Certainly it is more difficult to cover up one's lack of expertise when one is dealing with students one-on-one rather than as a class of 20 or more. How many teachers rely too much on teacher's workbooks and such in order to give a lesson? How many teachers could give a lesson without one of these ubiquitous teaching aids? It seems easy to lean on a large class size so one doesn't really have to teach and just recite a lesson out of a book. One is quickly tested as to how much one really understands when a child fails to understand the lesson. The teacher must then look for another way to explain the material, or to find the source of the misunderstanding or the appropriate imagery to accompany the explanation.
Exams for teachers may be able to quantify how many grammatical rules a teacher knows, but they cannot test the teacher for the possession of the "arts" -- grammar, rhetoric, logic, and so on, the skills that are needed for writing essays and speaking well. A teacher must master the basics, but not in a haphazard way. Rather, they need to acquire the arts as arts, so that they can re-present their knowledge to their students in an orderly and systematic fashion.
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