ACER and OAT win international award for PISA 2025 digital delivery

ACER and Open Assessment Technologies won Best International Implementation at the 2026 e-Assessment Awards for delivering PISA 2025 across 91 countries and economies. The recognition spotlights a large-scale digital assessment program that combined online and offline testing, multilingual delivery and adaptive tools for more than 900,000 sessions. Why it matters: - PISA 2025 is the world’s most widely used international student assessment, so the award highlights a model for running high-stakes education testing at global scale. - The implementation shows that a central digital platform can support comparability, security and access across very different infrastructure conditions. - The result matters for governments that rely on PISA data to compare education systems and guide policy changes. What happened: - The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and Open Assessment Technologies (OAT) won Best International Implementation at the 2026 e-Assessment Awards. - The award recognized the delivery of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025. - The eAssessment Association presents the annual awards for digital assessment work worldwide. - The official winners and finalists are listed here . The details: - ACER and OAT delivered PISA 2025 across 91 countries and economies. - The program supported more than 900,000 assessment sessions in 54 languages. - The assessment ran through a single integrated platform powered by TAO. - For the first time, PISA used a centralized digital assessment platform that supported both online and offline delivery. - More than 800,000 assessments were completed online. - More than 100,000 assessments were completed offline. - The platform included adaptive testing, interactive digital tasks, speaking and listening assessments, multilingual localization and secure data collection. - The implementation also used event-level interaction data capture for measurement. - The system supported secure, standards-based interoperability through QTI and LTI frameworks. - The consortium behind the program included ACER, OAT, cApStAn and HallStat. - The consortium handled operational consistency, linguistic quality, data integrity and technical reliability. Between the lines: - The award points to a broader shift in global testing toward digital systems that can work across both connected and low-connectivity environments. - The offline capability is especially important because it helps preserve participation and comparability in places with weaker infrastructure. - OAT said the project showed how a secure, scalable platform can preserve validity, comparability and operational reliability at unprecedented scale. - ACER said the work is about delivering comparable insight into whether young people are prepared to succeed in a complex world. - The recognition also suggests that future international assessments may be judged less on technology alone and more on whether platforms can balance central control with local flexibility. What’s next: - ACER said PISA 2025 provides a proven foundation and a clear pathway for future cycles. - The implementation is being positioned as a reference model for future global assessment programs. - The project’s operating lessons may shape how education systems design large-scale digital assessments in coming years. The bottom line: - PISA 2025 turned a global education benchmark into a large-scale digital test of delivery, and ACER and OAT’s win signals that hybrid online-offline assessment is becoming a new standard for international measurement.