Educational Testing Service (ETS): Advancing Quality and Equity in Education Worldwide

Introduction

Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a global education and talent solutions organization committed to enabling lifelong learners to be future-ready. Founded in 1947, this private, nonprofit organization plays a significant role in shaping the educational landscape through its various assessments, research, and services. ETS's mission is to advance quality and equity in education for learners worldwide, guided by its core values of social responsibility, equity and opportunity, quality, integrity, and customer service. Each year, ETS's assessment products and solutions, including the TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE, and Praxis Assessments, help 50 million people clarify their strengths and find opportunities for growth in education, work, and beyond.

ETS's Core Mission and Values

At its core, ETS is driven by a mission to promote quality and equity in education across the globe. This mission is supported by a set of core values that guide the organization's work:

Social Responsibility: ETS recognizes its responsibility to contribute to the well-being of society through its work in education.
Equity and Opportunity: ETS is committed to ensuring that all learners have access to quality education and opportunities for advancement, regardless of their background or circumstances.
Quality: ETS strives for excellence in all its products and services, ensuring that they are accurate, reliable, and valid.
Integrity: ETS operates with the highest ethical standards, maintaining transparency and accountability in all its activities.
Customer Service: ETS is dedicated to providing exceptional service to its clients and test-takers, addressing their needs and concerns in a timely and effective manner.

ETS's Assessment Products and Solutions

ETS offers a wide range of assessment products and solutions designed to measure skills and knowledge in various domains. These assessments are used by individuals, educational institutions, and government agencies for a variety of purposes, including:

Admissions: The TOEFL and GRE tests are widely used for admission to colleges and universities around the world.
Placement: ETS assessments can help place students in appropriate courses and programs based on their skills and knowledge.
Certification: The Praxis Series assessments are used for teacher certification in many states.
Workforce Development: The TOEIC test and other ETS solutions help individuals demonstrate their skills and knowledge to employers.
Accreditation: Institutions of higher education use the Major Field Tests to provide reliable documentation for accreditation, student achievement benchmarks, and curricula improvement.

Primary Assessment Products

ETS provides a range of assessments, some of the most popular ones include:

TOEFL®: The premier test of English communication, measuring language skills in an academic context.
TOEIC®: The world’s leading assessment in English communication skills for the workplace.
GRE®: Respected internationally as the leading assessment for admission to graduate and professional programs.

ETS Solutions

ETS collaborates with businesses, institutions and governments around the globe to deliver solutions that provide better outcomes. These solutions include:

Read also: Standards for Educational Testing

Credentialing: ETS applies its 75+ years of experience and gain research-driven expertise to transform current programs or to help develop customized assessments.
Talent & Workforce: ETS leverages intellectual property to drive an organization’s growth with innovative tools and software solutions.
Partnership: Exploring the family of ETS companies with expertise in assessment solutions that empower professional and educational growth journeys.

The Major Field Tests: Assessing Student Knowledge in Academic Majors

The ETS Major Field Tests are designed to assist higher education institutions and academic programs in evaluating student knowledge within specific academic majors. These tests can be valuable tools for assessing student learning outcomes, but it's crucial to understand their possibilities and limitations.

Appropriate Use of Major Field Tests

Institutions planning to use the Major Field Tests should be aware of the possibilities and limitations of the tests. These guidelines provide information about the appropriate use of the Major Field Tests for those who use the scores. They are also intended to protect test takers from unfair decisions that may result from inappropriate uses of the test.

Verifying Content Coverage: The first step is to verify that the content covered in the specific discipline aligns with what the institution seeks to measure. Requesting review copies for each member of the review committee is essential.
Validity Information: While ETS research has established the general appropriateness of using the Major Field Tests for assessing student learning outcomes, users should validate their use for other purposes. Departments and programs are encouraged to conduct their own validity studies.
Group Performance: If the purpose of testing is to make inferences about the performance of groups of students, institutions should test an adequate number of students from each of those groups. The selected students from each group should be representative of the group as a whole.

Motivating Students for Assessments

Assessments of student learning outcomes, such as the Major Field Tests, are widely used in higher education for accreditation, accountability, and strategic planning purposes. Although important to institutions, the assessment results typically bear no obvious consequence for individual test takers. This lack of consequence can have a negative impact on student motivation. ETS encourages institutions to implement strategies to boost student motivation to ensure that test results reflect your students' actual ability. Some institutions have had success motivating students by explaining how test results are used and how those results can affect the value of their college degree.

Using Test Scores in Conjunction with Other Criteria

Institutions of higher education use the Major Field Tests to provide reliable documentation for accreditation, student achievement benchmarks and curricula improvement. Additionally, test scores should always be used in conjunction with other criteria when making decisions about programs or individuals. A test contains only a sample of the content knowledge that students are expected to know within their discipline. On another sample of tasks designed to measure the same content, students might perform somewhat differently. The reliability of the individual student total scores should be adequate for identifying deficits in student knowledge. Every effort is made to include questions that assess the most common and important topics and skills as supported by feedback from curriculum surveys from institutions around the United States. It does not and cannot measure all the content of interest to institutions of higher learning. When the Major Field Tests are used to evaluate an institution or any of its programs, they should be used in conjunction with other information. The data in the Comparative Data Guide are drawn entirely from institutions that use the Major Field Tests. Within any category of institutions, those that use the Major Field Tests are not likely to be representative of all programs in that discipline.

The Evolution of ETS in the Age of AI

The education and workforce landscape has been rapidly disrupted by AI and evolving demands, creating pressure for ETS to evolve beyond its traditional role as a testing organization. Recognizing the potential of AI, ETS is exploring how it can be used to enhance assessment and learning. AI has made test creation faster and easier, but the real challenge isn’t efficiency. It’s impact and real progress. Without a vision and foundation of ethics, deep expertise and rigorous, research-backed frameworks, assessments risk becoming transactional rather than transformational. ETS didn’t need to follow the race to the bottom with low-cost, AI-driven solutions.

Read also: Mastering the ParaPro

Embracing Innovation and Technology

ETS is actively involved in research and development projects that explore the use of AI in education. For example, researchers are developing an AI-supported classroom assessment tool to measure middle-school students' reasoning patterns in scientific argumentation. Another project aims to create a generative AI-enhanced authoring tool for scenario-based assessments. These initiatives demonstrate ETS's commitment to leveraging technology to improve assessment and learning outcomes.

Expanding into Workforce Development

The category shift allowed ETS to expand its business model, moving beyond higher education into workforce development, offering B2B offerings for the first time in its history through ETS Solutions. ETS’s digital presence was completely redesigned and rebuilt to reflect its expanded role. In a moment when many viewed ETS as rigid, transactional and rooted in an outdated model of assessment, ETS flipped the script.

Ensuring Security and Fairness in Testing

ETS is committed to maintaining the security and integrity of its assessments. Producers and consumers of student assessments are increasingly concerned about fraudulent behavior before and during the test. ETS scoring policies make sure that scoring is fair and unbiased.

Addressing Accessibility Challenges

ETS is also working to address accessibility challenges for students with disabilities. For example, researchers are exploring ways to make computer-based test items more accessible to students who are Braille readers. Mathematical expressions are used in instructional materials, test-preparation materials, and educational assessments. These expressions pose an accessibility challenge for students with visual impairments because the information is difficult to convey using the available technologies, such as recorded or human-read audio.

ETS's Impact and Influence

ETS has a significant impact on education and society through its various activities. The organization develops, administers, and scores more than 50 million tests annually in over 180 countries. ETS serves individuals, educational institutions, and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English language learning, and elementary, secondary and postsecondary education, and by conducting education research, analysis, and policy studies.

Research and Development

ETS conducts extensive research to improve the quality and effectiveness of its assessments and to advance the field of education. The ETS Research Institute drives innovation in the science of measurement and advances equity and opportunity for all. ETS treats all score data for individuals and for institutions as confidential. Individual data are released only to the institution of the students tested. Identifiable institutional data are released only to the institution providing the data, unless the institution gives written permission to release the information to others.

Strategic Partnerships

ETS collaborates with other organizations to achieve its mission. According to Fred Manno, Business Technology Director for ETS, “We view Akamai as a strategic, trusted partner. We meet regularly with Akamai’s sales and technical staff to understand how Akamai solutions intersect with our needs. That was precisely how ETS came to use Secure Internet Access Enterprise.

Overcoming Challenges and Embracing the Future

Like so many other industries, the educational market has quickly moved from a paper-and-pencil world to an online world. ETS has successfully adapted to this shift, leveraging technology to enhance its services and reach a wider audience.

Adapting to the Online World

According to Fred Manno, Business Technology Director for ETS, “Our presence is 100% online. The applications ETS first offered over the web were housed in one data center on the East Coast. However, when the Clark County, Nevada, school district - one of the largest in the country - began using it, performance was not up to par. After conducting his due diligence, Manno selected the Akamai Web Application Accelerator (WAA) service. Rather than open a data center on the West Coast, ETS took advantage of WAA to accelerate its web applications. This enabled ETS to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in new data center costs while also lowering the number of help desk calls by 90%, reducing the time staff spent monitoring network locations. Given these impressive results, it was only natural that Manno continued turning to Akamai to address ETS’ additional site and application needs over time.

Addressing Security Threats

Like other organizations online, ETS has seen an increase in security threats. These solutions include Kona Site Defender and Client Reputation, which uses a state-of-the-art, proprietary risk analysis engine to compute a score for every source IP address to identify malicious clients. ETS continues to explore how it can work with Akamai to take advantage of the Zero Trust security model, deploying Enterprise Application Access as part of its ongoing commitment to network security.

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