Abstract
Soil contents of agricultural education curriculum seems difficult to students' grasping and retrieval due to assessment instruments used by examiners. Teachers and examination bodies make use of essay and alternative to practical to assess performance. These types of instruments assess students cognitively while psychomotor is neglected. These students graduate with little or no practical ability as needed in the world of work. Teachers are interested in finding alternative instruments that could measure performance at low cost so that their graduates could perform in the world of work, hence the need for this study to determine the cost and benefits in assessing students with rating scale (RS) and psycho-productive-multiple choice test (PT) as alternative instrument. The correlation study was carried in South East Nigeria. The population for the study was 122 made up of 42 Lecturers and 81 students all from Federal Universities with Agricultural Education programme in South East Nigeria. There was no sampling as the entire population participated in the study. Four sets of instrument were used for data collection. The items were validated by three experts while the reliability and stability of RS and PT were determined using Cronbach alpha and Kuder Richardson (K-R20) which yielded coefficients of 0.86 and 0.84 respectively. Data was collected by the researchers and eight assistants. The study revealed that RS had higher benefit but costs more while the PT costs less but had lower benefit. It was recommended that psycho-productive multiple choice test should be adopted in assessing students if the teacher is interested in practice and when less cost is under consideration but rating scale should be used when cost is not considered due to higher benefits bearing in mind other limitation of RS.