In the present version of the programme, all decisions relating to rating and feedback have to be made by the teachers themselves. It has already been said that the programme can also be used to produce exercises, which students then can do in relative privacy. The difference between exercise and test need not be great, so that the test-taker can expect how he or she is going to be tested. From the view point of validity, it can be argued that OTS is more suited for exercises and formative assessment, concentrating on some sub-skills and leaving it to other test formats to practice and assess other skills. One drawback of OTS , being of rather old technological design, is that it is less than user-friendly in the authoring mode.
Problems can arise with the location of files.
Also, the teacher needs to be fairly computer literate. It must be expected that what the authored programme offers to the learner is related to what the teacher has been teaching. It is the teacher who produces the prompts, does the rating and gives the feedback. As mentioned previously, eve although prompts and questions can be accompanied by a variety of media, the screen layout of OTS is fixed and the video window is rather small. Students regularly using the program could eventually succumb to boredom.