Harold
This post and your previous one bring to mind a thought I had whilst attending the ASTD Conference in San Diego earlier in the year (where my eyes were opened to P2P and Cloud learning).

The proliferation of web learning devices, gadgets and tools coupled with the tendancy towards open source knowledge may herald the demise or at least modification of a long extant distinction between formative and summative testing.

In short, if you publish a summative test - designed to demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives of any particular learning intervention it will become de facto a formative test for those equiped with the tools and the motivation to find out the relvant stuff for themselves.

All organisations need to do is be clear about the skills and behaviours they seek to encourage and reward and let the employees do the rest. In a large number of areas (although not all) if they designed and published the assessments and then paid a bonus to employees who passed them they could probably cut a large section out of their budgets. It would even leave them money to support those who do not have the tools or the inclination to teach themselves and still be better off. Mind you the likelihood of this happening in the near future is small.

Life has become or is becoming an open book test.

Best wishes
Hugh