A person's mastery of a body of knowledge is determined by having the
person write objective questions for a test that is given to a group of
test takers. The results of the test are then analyzed to determine how
well the person's questions discriminated between those who did well on
the test and those who did poorly. The better the questions discriminate,
the more mastery the person has of the body of knowledge. In a learning
situation, a cycle of study, writing questions, analyzing the results, and
determining mastery may be repeated until the desired degree of mastery is
reached. The technique may be used for individuals or groups and both the
question writers and the test takers may work in teams. Question writers
may also be test takers, and the evaluation of a question writer may
reflect both the extent to which his or her questions discriminate and his
or her performance on the test. Any medium may be used for communication
between the question writers, test takers, and the parties making and
giving the tests. One particularly active alternative is communication via
electronic mail, with test taking being done interactively on the
Internet. Also disclosed are using a test taker's ability to predict how
well a question will discriminate to evaluate him or her, techniques for
evaluating interactively-answered questions, and techniques for forming a
community of persons using the technique to learn a body of information.