Educational Testing Service

Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization. With an annual budget approaching $1 billion, it develops, administers, or scores more than 24 million tests annually (as of 2005) in more than 180 countries at more than 9,000 locations internationally. With locations worldwide, its operations are headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey.

ETS was founded by Henry Chauncey in 1947, with key support from the American Council on Education, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the College Entrance Examination Board. The core ideas behind ETS were put forth by former Harvard president James Conant. Its mission is to “advance quality and equity in education for all people worldwide.”

ETS encompasses five areas—research, assessment development, test administration, test scoring, and instructional products and services—but it is best known for assessment development. Perhaps its most well-known test, the SAT®, is actually published by the College Board, although ETS develops and administers the test as a work-for-hire (a procedure it also does for the Advanced Placement Exams). The SAT I measures Mathematics, Critical Reading, and Writing. The SAT IIs are subject-based tests that assess particular areas of learning.

Major ETS assessments include the GRE® (Graduate Record Examinations), TOEFL® (Test of English as a Foreign Language), and the Praxis tests for teacher certification. The GRE has three subtests: Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical Writing. The latter subtest replaced an Analytic Reasoning subtest on October 1, 2002. The TOEFL exam is currently paper based, although there is a shift toward an Internet-based measure. The paper-based measure assesses Listening Comprehension, Structure and Written Expression, and Reading Comprehension. The new Internet-based measure assesses along the four dimensions of Listening, Structure, Reading, and Writing. The Praxis is a series of three different tests: the first measures basic academic skills; the second measures general and subject-specific [Page 299]knowledge and teaching skills; and the third measures classroom performance. These three assessments represent only a hint of the many different ones offered by ETS.

ETS has many critics, perhaps most notably FairTest (although such critics tend to be against all methods of standardized testing, not solely ETS). FairTest and other critics argue that ETS tests are biased, overly coachable, and prone to misuse. One example of such criticisms is that men outperform women on the GRE Quantitative test by nearly a standard deviation despite the fact that women often outperform men in advanced mathematics in the classroom. The performance-based assessments that FairTest advocates, however, would likely create similar confounding issues.

Perhaps the primary competitor of ETS is the ACT, formerly the American College Testing Program, which produces the ACT tests. The ACT test is usually accepted in lieu of the SATs by most universities. In addition, ACT recently took over the development of the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) from ETS.