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Increasing people's ability to solve complex problems is more and more often being seen as an integral part of vocational education. While there have been numerous empirically based approaches to the didactic structuring of teaching and learning arrangements by which students' ability to solve problems can be increased, knowledge of how to evaluate a person's ability to solve problems is far more limited. There is a lack of testing instruments that are inexpensive to implement and evaluate and take account of the features of ill-defined prob-lems as they occur in professional practice. This article describes, with reference to a pilot study, the further development of a method of measuring a person's ability to solve problems (AIT according to Sembill) which is reliable but is too expensive to evaluate in practice (not inexpensive to evaluate). The new MAPS instrument (Measurement and Assessment of Problem Solving) is more structured in terms of both performance and evaluation. The results of the pilot study indicate a high level of reliability and validity of the new instrument, these results having to be confirmed in a follow-up study, the design of which is also presented in this article.