ACER and Open Assessment Technologies Receive Exceptional Merit Award for Global Delivery of PISA 2025

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and Open Assessment Technologies (OAT) have received an Exceptional Merit award at the 1EdTech Learning Impact Awards for their joint entry, One Platform. One Survey. Delivering PISA 2025 to the World—Online and Offline.

The award was presented at the 1EdTech Europe conference September 15-17, recognizing the organizations’ collaborative work in supporting the global delivery of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 through a single, integrated digital assessment platform.

As the OECD's lead contractor for PISA, ACER was responsible for the programme's global design and implementation, including the transition to a fully digital assessment platform. ACER worked closely with OAT to deliver the technology that supported assessment delivery at scale.

PISA 2025 represented a major milestone in international assessment delivery. Across 91 participating countries and economies, 54 languages, and more than 900,000 delivered sessions, the platform provided a consistent assessment experience across a wide range of devices, infrastructure conditions, and delivery environments. 

The platform supported both online and offline assessment seamlessly, helping ensure that differences in local connectivity did not create differences in assessment quality. Centrally managed assignment, configuration, sequencing, presentation, and data capture allowed participating countries to deliver the assessment according to a common global framework while accommodating local language and operational requirements.

“PISA 2025 demonstrated what can be achieved when assessment expertise, technology, and open standards come together around a shared global objective,” said ACER CEO Lisa Rodgers.  

“We are proud to deliver PISA 2025 in Australia, and lead the international programme on behalf of the OECD.

“This award recognizes the extraordinary collaboration required to deliver a complex international assessment consistently and reliably across vastly different educational and technical environments,” said Ms Rodgers.  

The platform was designed to support the demands of modern digital assessment, including multistage adaptive pathways, interactive simulations, detailed interaction data, and speaking and listening components for the Foreign Language Assessment. Full localization - including support for right-to-left languages - helped create an accessible and consistent experience for students worldwide.

Reliability was central to the project. Fewer than 1% of delivered sessions reported issues, while complete and auditable data capture supported the recovery and synchronization of interrupted and offline sessions without data loss.

“Delivering digital assessment at this scale is not simply a matter of putting test content on a screen,” said Miguel Prieto, VP Corporate Strategy - OAT. “It requires a platform that can protect comparability, support diverse infrastructure conditions, and capture reliable data across every session. This recognition reflects the strength of our collaboration with ACER and our shared commitment to equitable, standards-based assessment.”

At its core, PISA is about understanding whether young people are equipped to succeed in an increasingly complex world. Delivering that insight at global scale is only possible if every student, school and system can participate through a secure, reliable and comparable assessment experience.  

The project also demonstrated the practical value of interoperability in large-scale assessment. QTI-based content, LTI-based workflows, standardized delivery logic, and unified data handling enabled complex assessment components and delivery modes to operate within one coherent digital ecosystem.

By replacing fragmented local processes with a centrally managed platform, the solution reduced operational variability and delivery risk for participating national centers.

The Exceptional Merit award recognizes not only the scale of the PISA 2025 implementation, but its contribution to the future of digital assessment: demonstrating that open, standards-aligned technology can support fair, reliable, and innovative assessment worldwide.

About ACER

For more than 95 years, ACER has been driven by a single purpose – to improve learning for all. 

Founded in 1930, ACER began as a small team of researchers determined to bring rigour and evidence to education and assessment. Over the decades, that commitment has evolved into a global mission – combining world-class assessment and research to help learners, educators and systems in more than 150 countries understand what works in education, and why. 

About Open Assessment Technologies

Open Assessment Technologies provides the TAO digital assessment platform, helping education ministries, assessment organizations, publishers, and institutions develop and deliver secure, scalable, and interoperable assessments. Built on open standards, TAO supports flexible assessment ecosystems while enabling organizations to retain control of their content, data, and technology strategy.

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Australian Council for Educational Research

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Simon.Galletta@acer.org