Subjective vs. Objective

So let’s talk about the different assessment categories. For starters, all assessments can be broadly described as ranging from subjective to objective measures.

Subjective Assessments are useful because they provide a large amount of qualitative information. One issue with subjective measures is that the scoring is prone to biases of the individual who is administering and scoring the assessment, aka the assessor.

On the other hand, with Objective Assessments, the scoring is determined based on statistical relationships of patterns of responses and probabilities. So objective tests are not prone to rater biases, but they can be narrow in scope of measurement. Objective assessments are highly standardized and have a predetermined answer key and they are typically fully-automated.