Assessment of learning is critical to the learners, teachers, and designers of learning environments. Current assessment techniques in web-based distance learning apply age-old techniques to a new medium and are not adequate for web-based distance learning environments (WBDLE). The goals of this article are to extend existing critiques of assessment validity to web-based distance learning environments, define the problems with current WBDLE assessment methods using a learner, task, inference framework, and present three unique solutions to the problems. We describe our solutions, present validity and reliability issues for each method, and report instructor and student experiences with these solutions.