The passage looks to be a part of literary piece and it is written in past tense

Chapter 9
Testing Writing Skills
Writing skills are frequently tested in any type of assessment. However, many tester seem to include one or two essays in writing tests and do not follow any systematic principles in setting test items. This can produce harmful backwash effect on one hand, and on the other, it may cause to reduce validity and reliability of the test.
Writing skills can be tested indirectly. For example, grammatical accuracy is an important sub-skill of writing. This skill can be tested through certain MCQs. Organizational ability is another sub-skill of writing. This too can be tested by asking the candidates to choose appropriate linking word from a list of words given for completing a passage. These types of test items are objective and ensure higher reliability. However, these items do not guarantee candidate’s ability to produce a coherent text: we cannot say that candidate can describe an accident, for example, just because he answered all grammar questions on the use of past tense accurately. On the other hand, if these types of test items are consistently used in test papers, teachers will immediately ignore the practice of ‘true’ writing tasks in the classroom and pay more attention to help learners to answer MCQs correctly. This is another example, where the test has produced harmful backwash effect on classroom teaching.
Therefore, writing skills should be tested through direct writing tasks, which involve the candidates to perform the overall skill of writing. This chapter presents the details of systematic way of testing writing skills.

1. 
   Testing Challenges
   

The tester’s main task is to set writing tasks. But this is not easy. The tester should select tasks which are representative from whole of the tasks population given in the syllabus. The candidate’s ability to write an essay on Sri Lanka does not mean that he can write any descriptive essay.
By asking the candidate to write an essay, how does the tester assure that he has elicited a representative sample of candidate’s language behavior which truly represents his writing ability?
This means that as many writing tasks as possible must be included in the test paper. But there are practical problems. Most of all, if there are too many writing questions, the candidates will get bored and their true performances will not be shown.
Therefore, writing skills testing is a challenging area in English language testing. The tester’s careful planning and systematic approach will be essential in this process.

2.