Skills vrs Exams: Why?
At the root of education is the question of how do you demonstrate the you know what you know? For the instructor there is the related question of what/how do you ask to determine what the student knows? To be blunt most of us do unto you what was done unto us when we were students since that works for at least some subset of students. At the same time I have often worked with people who were not successful in this model and yet were brilliant contributors to the team and the effort.
Exams have the useful effect of getting everyone to focus on getting some level of (temporary) mastery of typical physics problems. Significant research has demonstrated that such mastery is fleeting for most of us. A buzzword in the world of assessment is 'authentic assessment' which is the process of posing problems that are more like tasks you might meet in a real workplace. Such tasks are more loosely defined, have embedded ambiguities, and a range of possible answers. These strategies seek to ask you, the student, to explore how you apply your knowledge in a more realistic context.
Unit Assessments tend to be more like exam problems except for being a little more loosely defined. The closest thing to an authentic assessment for this class is the final exam question which seeks to explore all or most of the physics we have done this term in the context of a single complex setting. Good Luck and 'Do Physics'!
