TAO

What it is

TAO is a digital assessment platform for building, delivering, scoring and reporting on tests, made by Open Assessment Technologies (OAT). Its home page calls it an open source assessment platform, and the free Community Edition can be installed and customized from the source code. The buyers it names are K-12 systems, higher education and professional testing programs, and the testimonials on the home page come from education ministries, a city school system and a certification body rather than from individual teachers. OAT's careers page lists offices in Luxembourg, San Francisco and Boston.

The home page sets out the pitch: the platform suits organizations "that want the freedom to control their assessment software," from authoring to delivery to reporting, with a choice of how to package it. A news item on the site announces that ACT has invested in Open Assessment Technologies, and another reports that ACER and OAT received an Exceptional Merit Award for the global delivery of PISA 2025.

Editions and pricing

The site lists four editions:

• TAO Community Edition: the free open-source platform code, which an organization installs and customizes itself. A press item announces a next-generation Community Edition with a new community forum.
• TAO Accelerate: a turn-key solution "to pilot your digital testing program for the first-time," which the home page says supports up to 2,400 deliveries.
• TAO Ignite: described as the most popular edition, a turn-key system with added scalability and dedicated account management on top of the same off-the-shelf feature set.
• TAO Enterprise: "a completely customized, deeply integrated computer-based testing platform," with custom integration support for organizations with their own requirements.

The pricing overview compares the tiers by user volume, a compare-plans page sets out what each edition includes, and visitors can request a demo or start a trial from the home page. The home page also describes three ways to begin: use the platform out of the box, have OAT customize it, or add your own functionality.

Authoring

Authoring is built on open education standards. The home page promises "easy tools, 21st-century item banking, and smart workflows" for assessment authors. TAO's QTI 2.2 certification matters most here. The accreditations page says TAO was the first assessment platform to obtain QTI certification, and that item, test and results data can be "freely exchanged within your learning ecosystem," which it presents as a freedom proprietary systems cannot offer.

The New York City Department of Education case study is titled around adding technology and multimedia to the city's language proficiency exams, and the French Ministry of Education's testimonial praises the ability "to create attractive and engaging items that make our assessments more effective."

Delivery, proctoring and accessibility

Rostering and delivery cover candidate management and delivery "via test-centers, groups or the LTI standard." TAO Advance is the next-generation delivery engine, which the site calls award winning and fully WCAG compliant, with accommodations for test takers with diverse needs. Proctoring tools give administrators extra controls during a test session, alongside security features meant to discourage cheating. Administrators manage user accounts and access through the platform's authentication and authorization controls.

Accessibility gets its own section on the home page: universal design, WCAG compliance and assistive tools for audio, visual and keyboard support. The accreditations page lists WCAG 2.1 AA and says TAO is built for accessibility "from the ground up."

TAO in the Cloud runs on GCP and AWS, which the home page says gives "best-in-class security and worry-free scalability during critical testing campaign windows." Lithuania's National Agency for Education says the move to TAO Enterprise and TAO Cloud let it shift its focus "from technical resources and capacity assurance problems to areas of assessment content development."

Scoring and reporting

Objective items are scored automatically. For open responses, TAO Grader adds technology-assisted human scoring, and the home page says it "enables easy and collaborative open response marking to help improve the reliability of test scores." Grader is embedded in the next-generation interface and gives near-real-time student and group performance reports. TAO Insights gives access to data from OAT's datastore through an API, and the reporting module is meant to turn testing data into teaching improvements and personalized assessment.

Standards and compliance

The accreditations page lists five standards:

• ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management, which OAT says it has achieved.
• ISO/IEC 23988, the international code of practice for using IT in the delivery of assessments, covering the security and fairness of IT-delivered assessments, including the recording and scoring of candidate responses.
• QTI 2.2 for question and test interoperability.
• LTI 1.3 for connecting with learning management systems, remote tools and content, which the page says also adds a layer of security for authentication.
• WCAG 2.1 AA for accessibility.

The same page invites buyers to contact OAT's security team with questions or security findings.

Customers and support

Testimonials on the home page come from the New York City Department of Education, The Linux Foundation Training & Certification, the Japanese Ministry of Education (through a partnership with Infosign), the French Ministry of Education, Lithuania's National Agency for Education and the National Center and State Collaborative. The Linux Foundation says it is looking at TAO "as the core backbone of our assessment system," with the aim of reducing the cost of test delivery. The National Center and State Collaborative says open source was "not the only factor" in its RFP and points to TAO's degree of customization and its history in large-scale implementations. Another case study covers the education ministry of the Valencian Community, which uses a cloud-based TAO system for diagnostic assessment.

For help, the site offers a knowledge base with lessons and videos, an FAQ, a user guide, eBooks and whitepapers, a support service, a Partner Connect program and a community forum for the open-source edition.

Who it suits

TAO suits education ministries, school districts, universities and certification bodies that run large testing programs and want control over their assessment software. The open-source Community Edition gives teams with developers a way to run and extend the platform themselves; Accelerate fits a first pilot of digital testing, Ignite a program that has grown past it, and Enterprise an organization that needs custom integrations. The QTI and LTI certifications make TAO a natural pick for institutions that want items and results to move between systems, and the ISO 23988 and WCAG commitments speak to high-stakes and public-sector buyers.

It is not built for a single teacher or a course creator who wants a quick quiz inside a course. TAO is a full assessment system, and getting the most from it means planning a testing program, whether that is self-hosting the open-source code or working through a demo with OAT.