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| Conventional Objective |  The most important benefits of this kind assessment are the competence and economy of administration and scoring. Moreover it is comparatively simple to construct such tests with extremely reliable scores.
On the other hand, such benefits of effectiveness and dependability are principally achieved throughout the capability of testing a lot of students at the same time under the same standardized, controlled setting. When applied to a distance education setting, requiring all students in a class to be tested throughout the same standardized procedure at the same controlled location is not possible. If we were to regulate to the distance education environment by administering conventional objective tests independently at the students' own location, the benefits of effectiveness and reliability disappear. Students would take the exam at diverse times under different conditions with different obtainable resources. Text security is nonexistent. We cannot even establish that the responses to the test really came from the student. These factors would almost certainly render the scores from such evaluations not sufficiently reliable for significant decisions.
The appropriateness of conservative multiple-choice testing for student evaluations in distance education may be rather limited. This testing particularly would not be suitable for placement decisions and total evaluations. The use of such tests would be compulsory only if students can be tested at designated test centers under controlled settings for these purposes. This would fundamentally be a system of distance learning but central evaluation.
The conventional objective testing process might be helpful for the ideas of formative evaluation and diagnostic evaluation offered. For the reason of formative evaluation, tests can be expanded together with instructional materials. This will work well with the self-organization necessary for distance education students. They can work with materials until prepared for the test and take it when they are prepared. Successful completion of the text offers suggestion that the student is prepared for the next unit of instruction. Dependability is not the main concern in this case since if the test scores are in error, the student would experience complexity in the next unit. In such a situation, the student can merely go back to the previous unit for reviews.
With the advances in student evaluations, an obvious question is whether distance education can benefit from any of these changes. Furthermore, with the great variety of obtainable evaluation approaches, are there any exact approaches that might be mainly appropriate for student evaluation in distance education? Since student assessments serve a lot of dissimilar purposes in the learning process such as placement decisions, formative assessment, diagnostic evaluation, and summative evaluation the answer is not simple. These purposes are applicable to both traditional and distance education. However, definite evaluation approaches might be quite appropriate for a number of purposes but not others.
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