When you evaluate assessment software, the conversation usually starts and ends with features: Which question types are supported? Can it handle adaptive testing? How does the reporting dashboard look? These questions are a good starting point, but they don’t go quite far enough.
What tends to get overlooked is how the platform handles the content it’s entrusted with. For example, can assessment items be exported in a standard format? Will they survive a migration to another system in five years? How about integrations with the wider EdTech ecosystem?
A well-constructed request for proposal (RFP) does more than compare features. It acts as a strategic control point in assessment, giving you the opportunity to define features, standards, structures, and data practices that protect long-term flexibility. In this article, we’ll show you how to structure your assessment RFP to avoid vendor lock-in for the long run.
Key Takeaways
- Many assessment RFPs fall short because they never clearly define interoperability in procurement requirements.
- Procurement decisions directly shape long-term system flexibility, especially around content portability and integration.
- Assessment content should be treated as a long-term institutional asset, with procurement requirements covering data ownership, export format, and metadata preservation.
- 1EdTech certification and registration numbers provide a verifiable way to keep vendors accountable to interoperability claims.
Why Many Assessment RFPs Fall Short
Assessment RFPs may never be perfectly written, polished documents, but they can still be well thought out and strategically sound. What that means is they have to go beyond current functionality, such as question types, scoring, and analytics, to tackle structural questions that will determine the flexibility of assessment software five or 10 years from today.
Of all the areas most commonly overlooked, interoperability has to be the most important. Most RFPs either omit it entirely or refer to it in vague terms, like “must support industry standards.”
The problem with this is that it gives vendors the latitude they need to interpret compliance in a way that suits them, not necessarily the school system. A vendor might claim that their system is interoperable, for example, because their platform can import a CSV, even though it can’t export a fully structured assessment package that you could easily use on another platform.
As a result, many institutions discover they’ve been locked into a contract only when they try to migrate. For example, they might find that assessment items, metadata, scoring rules, and accessibility configurations are locked into their legacy system. Replicating these structures in other places can take months and often costs more than expected.
How Procurement Decisions Shape Long-Term Flexibility
The proper place to address these issues is during the RFP process. Procurement teams that treat interoperability as a strategic requirement, rather than a technical detail, set their institutions up for long-term success.
The platform you select becomes the container for a growing body of assessment content, the integration point for other software, such as learning management systems (LMSs), student information systems (SISs), and analytics, and the mechanism through which you meet accessibility requirements.
When you choose a platform without clear interoperability requirements, your institution gradually cedes control. When you rely on a vendor’s proprietary implementation rather than open, standardised formats that are portable between systems without data loss, your cost of switching platforms grows with each passing year.
To account for flexibility, you don’t need to predict the future. Instead, you need to insist on open standards, clearly defined export capabilities, and contractual commitments to portability. All of these can be stated up front in the RFP, when your institutional leverage is at its highest.
How To Build an Interoperable Assessment RFP
Saying “the platform must be interoperable” is a bit like saying “the building must be safe.” Without specifics, you’ve got nothing to enforce. To make interoperability a genuine requirement, you need to be specific and concrete about the referenced standards, their versions, and how compliance will be verified.
The QTI standard
The Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) standard, maintained by the EdTech consortium 1EdTech, is the most widely used standard for packaging and exchanging assessment content across platforms. It defines how items, tests, scoring rules, and metadata are structured in a portable XML format so that content authored in one system can be delivered in another.
The QTI standard has evolved through several major versions, including QTI 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0. Each of these versions supports different capabilities. The latest version, QTI 3.0, adds native HTML5 support, computer adaptive testing, and portable custom interactions. It also improves rendering consistency across platforms.
Version numbers matter—for example, a vendor certified for QTI 2.1 may not be able to handle QTI 3.0 content, and vice versa. Since 1EdTech wound down QTI 2.1 certification in late 2024, RFPs written today should reference QTI 3.0 unless there’s a specific legacy reason not to do so, such as if your devices can’t support it.
APIP and accessibility
APIP (Accessible Portable Item Protocol) was originally a separate 1EdTech standard that ensured assessment content could carry accessibility information like text-to-speech hints, sign language references, Braille support, or alternative text in a portable format.
With QTI 3.0, these capabilities have been added to the QTI standard. For procurement, this means the RFP can reference the standard instead of relying on vendor-specific rules. If your institution has specific accommodation requirements, it’s worth noting that 1EdTech’s QTI 3.0 certification includes an “Elevated Accessibility” profile that covers spoken support, long descriptions, and tactile references.
Certification > compliance
Any vendor can claim QTI compliance, but certification means the product has actually been tested against defined conformance standards and received a registration number you can verify against the 1EdTech TrustEd Apps Directory.
1EdTech’s own RFP guidance recommends specifying the required certification version and profile, as well as asking vendors to provide their registration number in their proposals. When vendors haven’t yet achieved certification, the RFP can require it by a specific date, with contractual consequences if a deadline is missed.
Metadata and structured content
Bear in mind that interoperability isn’t just about whether content can move between systems. It’s also about whether it’s still meaningful when it arrives.
For example, if questions are exported as plain text, they’ll lose their scoring logic, curriculum alignment, difficulty classification, and accessibility markup. The QTI standard covers learning object metadata (LOM) and allows curriculum standards metadata to be applied across the package, resource, and item levels.
When you’re writing an RFP, you should define which metadata is required in exported assessment packages, for example, curriculum standard alignment (using the CASE [Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange] standard), item difficulty and discrimination indices, content domain tags, language information, and accessibility descriptors. That way, the information that makes an item bank searchable, analyzable, and reusable isn’t stripped away during export and migration.
Looking forward
The QTI standard has evolved through multiple versions, and accessibility requirements are tightening in line with updates to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Moreover, analytics standards such as Caliper continue to develop. To future-proof your RFP, you’ll need to accommodate changes to these standards.
1EdTech provides a “Statement of Intent to Adopt 1EdTech Standards in a Timely Manner” for inclusion in procurement documents and asks vendors to commit to supporting updated specifications within a reasonable timeframe. An RFP can also build in periodic interoperability reviews as checkpoints to re-evaluate vendors against current standards. This creates an ongoing incentive to maintain support rather than treating certification as a one-time box to tick.
Assessment Content is a Long-Term Institutional Asset
A well-designed assessment item—one that’s been classroom-tested, validated, aligned to curriculum standards, tagged with metadata, and designed for accessibility—is a significant investment. Over time, an item bank becomes a valuable and distinct educational resource. Yet procurement processes rarely reflect this, focusing on the platform rather than the content.
An RFP that treats assessment content as an institutional asset should address ownership (content created by or for the institution belongs to the institution), export capability, and metadata integrity. Without clearly stating that platforms must export all content in a QTI-conformant package that preserves its full integrity, you’ll have no contractual basis on which to insist on this later.
At the same time, adding interoperability to the criteria doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your RFP. Instead, it’s just about adding a few targeted additions. Does the vendor hold a current 1EdTech QTI certification, and if so, at what level? Can they demonstrate a real content export in QTI format, or can they refer you to content migrations they’ve done for other institutions?
These questions test whether a vendor’s business model is compatible with the institution’s need for flexibility. Vendors who have invested in standards certification will welcome them, and those who have not will deflect or offer vague assurances. Your evaluation process should be designed to distinguish between the two.
Making Procurement a Strategic Hinge Point
Procurement is where long-term assessment strategy is defined. Every requirement in an RFP, ranging from the standards you specify to how you define content ownership, will shape your institution’s ability to adapt, migrate, and maintain control of your assessment ecosystem for years to come.
To incorporate this long-term perspective, you’ll need to add questions about QTI versions and certification, data ownership and export formats, and accessibility portability. These questions are free to ask and can save you significant time and effort down the road.
If your institution is approaching an assessment procurement cycle, review your current RFP template and ask whether it defines interoperability in enforceable terms. If it doesn’t protect your content as an institutional asset, then it’s time to make a few revisions.