What is the difference between subjective assessment and objective assessment?

Answer 1

Assessment is the process of measuring knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes and documenting the same.

In general assessment can be objective or subjective. Objective assessment is a form of questioning which has a single or multiple specific correct answer. Subjective assessment is a form of questioning which may have more than one current answer (or more than one way of expressing the correct answer). There are various types of objective and subjective questions. Objective question types include true/false multiple choice and multiple-response etc. Subjective questions include extended-response questions and essays.

Objective assessment is becoming more popular as they are easier to administer, a large area of subjects/topics can be covered and can be assessed in small time. In addition the chances of errors on account of handwriting etc are also eliminated.

In objective assessment multiple choice questions are most popular although true/false, multiple response, fill-in-blanks and matching are also used in some exams.

In past few years responses of objective assessment are recorded on machine readable forms and as such results are drawn more quickly and accurately.

Recently dramatic increase in usage of Computers and internet has supported increased use of online assessment using objective questions

Online testing broadly is a assessment by using information technology. This generally is also called as e- assessment.

The assessment can be based on a criteria or can be general i.e without any specific criteria such as IQ tests.

Most of exams which have specific syllabus assess students based on a certain criteria where questions are drawn from specific areas (say physics, chemistry, mathematics etc), the questions are of certain type (say multiple choice, multiple response etc) the questions are of a certain level of difficulty, the questions are to be answered in some given time and there is a criteria to allocate marks/grade for correct/incorrect responses and questions not attempted. Testbag is currently catering to such type of assessments using multiple choice questions (which is most popular form of objective assessment).