It was Lorrie Shepard (2000) who helped our thinking when she explained how the terms objective and subjective are left over from a time in education when behavioural objectives (rather than prescribed learning standards) focussed on rote memory and recall, and the word objective was used to describe tests in which students filled in the blanks, matched, and answered multiple-choice questions.

Today our curriculum requirements include problem-solving, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, scientific open-mindedness, and willingness to question and promote discussion (to mention just a few). These learning standards require different assessment methods to measure student performance that go beyond “objective” tests and include interviews, observations and a number of other nontesting methods that some people still connect to the term subjective.

In the five-step approach we describe in this book, we identify the complexity of learning and show how to include a variety of evidence that goes beyond numbers to arrive at letter grades that show a concrete picture of student learning. Ruth Sutton (1997) sums it up when she says, “Whether we like it or not, assessment and evaluation is still a complex process of human judgment” (10).