Delivery Execution

A roundabout (and rather strange) way of saying in TAO that Melanie Potts and her fellow classmates are about to sit George’s geography test is to say that the (test) delivery is going to be executed. When it comes to delivering assessments, this is the only really problematic term: delivery execution. The TAO Glossary defines Delivery execution as “The event of a test-taker beginning an assessment based on a TAO delivery”.

The two TAO terms delivery and delivery execution can cause confusion for the reason mentioned in the discussion on the term delivery in the first part of this course: in everyday language, the word delivery means what delivery execution means in TAO. (As a reminder, here is the everyday definition of the word ‘delivery’ from the last chapter: “the everyday meaning of the word delivery can be one of two things. It either denotes a thing that has been delivered, or it denotes the process of delivering something”.) This has the knock-on effect that delivery execution contains a tautology: it is the process of delivering something which is being delivered.

Because of this language problem, it is more natural to talk about 'delivering a test' (or even holding a test session) rather than 'executing a delivery', and indeed the expression 'delivering a test' is used frequently. Although this expression may perhaps be the clearer of the two, it brings other problems with it. A user would be forgiven for getting confused by the use of the terms in it, for example: you can't actually deliver a test in TAO in the strict meaning of the TAO term test because a test needs to be converted into a delivery first. It's probably easiest to think first and foremost of the concepts involved (what is it that you're assembling and what form does it have to be in to be able to have your test-takers take it) rather than get hung up on the terminology.

Let's stay with the terminology as used in TAO for now (rather than the more intuitive terms). To recap on the term delivery from the previous chapter: a delivery is a frozen and immutable version of a test, equivalent in form to a published book on the shelves of a bookstore. It is not the actual delivery of the test in either of the usual meanings of the word 'delivery'. At this stage, only the content of the assessment has been defined, but nothing else. The time and place have not yet been defined for any assessments based on this delivery, nor have any test-takers been assigned to take it. This all needs to happen – assigning test-takers, and defining settings (such as time) - before delivery execution, as described above, can take place.

The image below shows the test-taker Melanie Potts sitting George's assessment - in other words, the delivery execution of the ‘Capital Cities’ assessment.

Melanie's test