The reasons for adopting e-assessment are many and various: rising student population coupled with decreasing academic numbers; increasing requirements for more frequent formative assessment whether in higher education or in the workplace; and the need to align the means of assessment with modern teaching methods and virtual learning environments.

Electronic assessment has been available for some time, but in practice is usually limited to tests with simple selected answers such as multiple choice which can be automatically marked.

This has left the time-consuming work of setting and marking more complex and high level summative examinations to the human assessors and administrators, who are increasingly under pressure to maintain pedagogical standards while making best use of limited time and resource.

Assessment21 offers a significant step forward in e-assessment for high level summative examinations.

By supporting long and constructed answers that include diagrams and mathematical formulae as well as the more common multiple choice question types it provides easy-to-use yet highly sophisticated tools for the setting, administration and most importantly marking of virtually any type of formative or summative assessment.

It is the first complete process to employ the Human Computer Collaborative approach - where the machine does the time-consuming routine tasks while the human assessor makes the all important value judgments, staying fully in control of the eventual outcome.

Assessment21 means that e-assessment can now be confidently employed at the highest levels by both higher education and professional bodies.