Summative assessments, especially in the form of testing and grading, are a powerful exercise of authority and “Teachers often seem unable to [...] resist external impositions when they are regressive. This may in part be because of a lack of conceptual assessment tools to evaluate and construct counter arguments, or the practical skills to investigate tests [and] test use” (Fulcher, 2012, p. 114) Therefore, both language educators and language teachers need to be “competent in the principles and practice of language assessment” (Harding & Kremmel, 2016, p. 101) and to “demonstrate the knowledge and skills required to coherently align classroom and large-scale assessment” (Pastore & Andrade, 2019, p. 130). The construct of summative assessment literacy (SAL) thus incorporates knowledge, practice and dispositions and draws on established theoretical concepts (e.g. validity) (Bachman & Palmer, 2010). This study is based on the notion that “teacher cognitions and practices are mutually informing” (Borg, 2003, p. 81) and investigates pre-service teachers’ perceptions and conceptual understanding at the end of their teacher education. Specifically the research questions focus on how they express the difference between summative and formative assessments, what constitutes good testing practice and how critical terms (e.g. validity, authenticity) are understood or misconceived in relation to language assessment. The data was collected during the last semester of teacher education at two major Swedish universities through three open-ended questions in an extensive online survey (N=40) and semi-structured, in-depth interviews (N=20). The initial results based on qualitative content analysis procedures indicate that pre-service teachers have a praxeological and socio-emotional understanding (Pastore & Andrade, 2019) of assessment and testing, but when it comes to several key concepts such as validity their comprehension is often superficial. The results better our understanding of pre-service teachers’ summative assessment literacy and enables us to improve assessment components language teacher education.