Readiness Assessments and Assessment Authoring
Readiness Assessments and Assessment Authoring are tools developed by the Office of Assessment and housed on the test portal to support educators. These assessment systems are designed to help educators understand, report, and respond appropriately to student knowledge and skills throughout the year and create their own assessments using a familiar testing platform. Both assessment systems allow educators access to a large bank of Ohio released test questions which are aligned to Ohio’s Learning Standards.
Readiness Assessments
To Access:
Contact your Building or District Test Coordinator for Test Information Distribution Engine (TIDE) credentials to access Readiness Assessments.
Readiness Assessments are a suite of optional and free assessment tools for students in grades 3 through high school. The purpose of these assessments is to provide educators with actionable performance data that is useful in gauging students’ knowledge and performance. As part of a balanced system of local informal and formative assessments, the Readiness Assessments help schools identify student progress quickly using assessments that are aligned with Ohio's Learning Standards and built using released items from Ohio's State Tests.
Readiness Assessments are comprised of two components: Benchmark Tests and Checkpoint Assessments.
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Benchmark Tests are full-length tests that mirror the content and test characteristics of Ohio’s State Tests in terms of length, test specifications, blueprints and tools available to students (such as the calculator). These benchmark tests are machine-scored, allowing reporting in near real-time to give teachers rapid access to results. Mirroring Ohio’s State Tests also allows for reporting measures that are familiar to Ohio educators, such as scaled scores and performance levels. Results are reported in the Centralized Reporting System.
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Checkpoint assessments consist of six to 10 items and provide a range of opportunities to assess within each reporting category for each of the Ohio’s State Tests. Items offer varying levels of difficulty or complexity, as well as breadth of Ohio’s Learning Standards for the reporting category. These assessments are machine-scored. Raw scores (the number of items correct) as well as the students’ responses are provided in the Centralized Reporting System.
Assessment Authoring
The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is excited to provide Assessment Authoring, an online tool that empowers educators to assemble and administer assessments using released test questions that were written and field-tested for Ohio’s State Tests (OST) and Alternate Assessments for Students with the Most Significant Cognitive Disabilities (AASCD). Educators can review the entire set of released OST and AASCD questions, build tests from the released questions, administer the tests to their students online or on paper, and see their students’ performances quickly after administering a test online. Assessment Authoring is available at no cost to school districts. Educators can log into Assessment Authoring with the same credentials they use to access the Test Delivery System (TDS), Centralized Reporting System (CRS), and Test Information Distribution Engine (TIDE) through the OST or AASCD Portal.
How to Use Assessment Authoring
Assessment authoring offers a range of valuable functions. This tool enables users to:
Testimonials
“I use the Readiness Assessments in my classroom for formative and summative assessment purposes. I also use these tests to collect data on areas where my students might still have some misconceptions or misunderstandings.”
~ Elementary school teacher, Ashville, OH
“Our school district uses Authoring for formative assessment purposes for each quarter to inform our instruction, especially with writing. This platform allows teachers to build robust, unique, and rigorous interim, formative, or summative assessments depending on a variety of purposes for students of all abilities.”
~ Fifth grade teacher, Cincinnati, OH
“I use the Readiness Assessments and Assessment Authoring tools to create both formative and summative assessments for my classroom. I use the data to evaluate student understanding and to plan interventions and re-teaching curriculum. The tools have allowed me to become more data-informed within my classroom, to better meet the needs of my students.”
~ High school science teacher, Marion, OH
"Readiness Assessments are invaluable! It truly helps the students to see and understand their areas of strengths and weaknesses. These are strokes of genius! And thankfully they are easily available to us. These are especially helpful for 3rd graders. With using the Readiness Assessments, the children are not stressed coming into the end of year assessment. They are calm and confident."
~ District Test Coordinator, Cleveland, OH
Additional Resources
Readiness Assessments
Assessment Authoring
Find out more about Readiness Assessments and Authoring from Ohio's Assessment Conference:
Last Modified: 9/2/2025 7:24:45 AM