Assessment is an important element of education and training. Any learning system requires an assessment system to track, measure and evaluate the success of training. The AMS can also be used for tailoring the delivery of learning for individual needs by collating feedback from users. In Network-based delivery systems, the role of online assessment is essential as it enables regular feedback.

When compared to the conventional paper based methods, online assessment has several advantages. These advantages are as follows:

• Organizing tests for large, distributed audience becomes possible
• Automatic marking of quizzes reduces the time for reporting results, because reports can be created automatically and published on the Web
• Reduces the need for human resources for marking the quizzes does not increase with an increase in the number of students.
• It is possible to store the answers and results in a file system or a database for further processing

Traditionally, teaching assessments are conducted at the end of a course. This does not facilitate constructive feedback. In instructor-designed and administered web-based courses, assessments open a proactive dialogue with students about teaching, the course and the entire learning process.

The "Assessment Engine" is a key element of the AMS that is used to create robust user-definable inspection and assessment systems. The main functionality of the Assessment Engine is to access the student's performance. The performance is tracked based on the score attained by student in examination.

Types of Assessments:

Assessments can be of several types. Some of the most common types that are used in e-learning modules are as follows:

• multiple choice (with multiple or single response, i.e. checkbox or radiobutton)
• true-or-false, with the option to choose unknown word, where the specification of correct answer can include wildcards and a list of alternative matching words
• fill-in-blanks, a sentence with several blank words to be filled in by a numeric, where the allowable tolerance may be specified by the teacher
• Scenario-based: The assessments in these courses would also be scenario-based, where we show the learner an animated scenario.
• graphical (point-and-click), that contains an image and the answer is one or more areas in the image
• essay, free text answer for which there is no automatic analysis or scoring available