It may be more a way to organize or structure a string of assessments, rather than an individual assessment method itself. There needs to be an objective component to our evaluation system, something that can be reduced to numbers. But not all of our assessments need to produce a score or a rank. We need to determine when we need scores and how we determine mastery of skills or content. We want our assessment system to be reliable and valid.
Reliability looks at the stability of student rankings.
We need to establish the criterion or domain validity of our exams, and there is less research on how to do this. An objective exam, even if reliable, can lack validity if it is too focused on minutia, and not on the larger basic science issues. Need to select the evaluation tools that most effectively produce the type of information we want on our students. Need to keep our goal of producing good qualified doctors in mind as we develop the evaluation system. Screening versus in-depth testing.