【正文】 sional typist may be assessed for the efficiency of editing as well as correctness. This paper describes the technology required to add flexibility to puterbased assessors, with examples, and shows how adding flexibility to an assessor expands the potential uses. KEY WORDS Computerised assessment, IT skills, skills assessment. 1. INTRODUCTION There are three stakeholders in puterised assessment。 1. The plexity and difficulty of the exercise set. 2. The number of equivalent correct answers. 3. The plexity of the assessment criteria. 4. The type and amount of feedback required. FLEXIBILITY IN PRACTICE There are many different ways in which flexibility is built into practical skills assessors. This section categorises some of the reasons and gives examples of such categories of flexibility which have been built into IT skills assessors. FLEXIBILITY IN THE MODEL Flexible Question Setting In general, many examiners wish to have the ability to set their own exercises, rather than select from the set of exercises provided. Providing the examiner with the tools to set their own exercises can be problematic for the producer of an automated assessor. The reason for this is that the difficulty of assessing IT skills exercises depends to a large extent on the amount of interaction between individual errors and this interaction between errors can be reduced to some extent by careful exercise design. If examiners or tutors are given the flexibility to generate their own exercises there is a danger that they may increase the difficulty of assessment and reduce the puterised assessors accuracy. Providing automated setting aids that alert examiners to bad practice can reduce this possibility. Example – WordTask Tutor’s Module, Dowsing et al. (1996) The WordTask wordprocessing assessor contains a Tutor’s Module as part of the suite of assessment programs. This module allows a tutor or examiner to customise the assessor to his/her needs. One of the functions provided allows the tutor to add new exercises to the exercise set as well as determining the amount of feedback to the student and the amount and type of reporting. This module does not include exercisevetting checks to warn the tutor of incipient assessment problems although a development of this program for professional examination does. Flexible Answers The result of an IT skills exercise can be assessed either by assessing the oute, that is, the final document produced, or by assessing the method used to generate the result. If the final document is assessed then the candidate has the flexibility to use whatever method he/she wishes to generate the correct result. If the method used is assessed then the candidate has less flexibility. Many skills exercises are assessed by oute and hence the candidate has the flexibility to use whatever method he/she wishes to generate the required result. Most IT tools provide the user with many equivalent functions to perform the same action, for example, there are many different ways of centring a heading using a word processor – centring mand, tab, spaces. In some instances it is the appearance of the output of the test on paper which is assessed and thus any of the function binations which produce the correct appearance are acceptable. In other cases, especially where several people cooperate in the production of a document, the method by which an effect is produced is important. For example, changing all the headings in a document to a different font with different attributes is simple if styles have been used but difficult if they have