News Roundup: August 7 to 23
Financial results from Duo and Pearson, transparency in testing, updated IELTS stats... and more!
Duolingo Reports Q2 Results
Duolingo’s Q2 results for 2025 were published a couple of weeks ago. The Duolingo English Test had revenues of $10,088,000 for the quarter. Since the test costs $70, we might estimate that it was taken about 144,114 times in the quarter. But this is a very rough estimate because not everyone pays $70. Some pay extra for faster results, some pay less by purchasing a bundle or buying through a partner organization. Others pay nothing thanks to the DET Access Program (which gave away about 25,000 free tests in 2024).
In Q2 of 2024 the test had revenues of $10,968,000 at $65 a pop, representing something in the ballpark of 164,584 total tests.
This suggests about a 12% decline in volume from last year.
Pearson Reports Interim Results
In my last email, I failed to mention Pearson’s interim results, which were published August 1. They reported that PTE Volumes were down in H1 by about 10% compared to H1 of last year. That likely represents a total of about 491,000 tests for H1 2025.
Volumes of all the big tests are down this year, which is not a surprise.
IDP Education is scheduled to publish full year results at the end of this month. ETS will likely file a 990 form later this month. That’ll be available to the public whenever the Internal Revenue Service gets around to processing it.
TOEFL Essentials Set for Canada
ETS has been named a recognized testing organization by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and the TOEFL Essentials Test will soon be accepted for immigration purposes. A press release from ETS confirms that the test will be offered at testing centers at that time.
ETS will be in competition with the IELTS General, PTE Core and CELPIP tests in this space.
This is a big win for ETS. Testing for Canadian immigration is a pretty big market, and ETS has basically none of that market at the moment.
More on TOEFL Raters
Speaking of TOEFL, the PIE News has dug into the issues surrounding a petition launched by TOEFL speaking raters who are seeking clarity regarding their status with ETS.
According to the petition, scoring of TOEFL speaking responses has largely been offshored to India, a process which began in December of last year. This comes after about twenty years of speaking responses being scored solely by raters working in the USA.
A scoring leader who went on the record with The PIE noted: “[t]he email that came in December was well crafted… they said they were going to be including global raters and that some would see their shifts increase and others would decrease.”
And also: “[c]ome February, lots of raters would email me and say they were only scheduled for five days out of the month, some having registered their availability for every day… [c]ome March, they might get 10 days for the month, but a day and a half before their shift, they’d get an email saying that half of their shifts were cancelled.”
That scoring leader noted that “shifts for US test raters had all but dried up in April, though test scorers training the new global raters continued receiving shifts.”
Those training shifts had mostly concluded by June.
The article describes some quality-related concerns that said scoring leader (along with an anonymously quoted leader) has with the change.
The PIE contacted ETS for comment, who responded, in part:
“In response to these changing demands, we made the strategic decision in late 2024 to expand our scoring capabilities beyond the US. This shift allows us to better serve a global testing population, increase operational flexibility, and uphold the quality and efficiency our customers expect.”
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Personally, I’m sure that the overseas raters will eventually perform up to the same standards as the former American workforce. That said, it seems like the workforce in question has been treated somewhat shabbily in recent months.
LSAT Cheating out of Control
The LSAT will be suspended in China for an indefinite period of time following the October administration of the test. This is due to excessive cheating in that market.
The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) has indicated that testing may resume when they can figure out how to offer in-person testing in China, but I don’t think that will be an easy task. Currently, all LSAT testing in China is remote, with proctoring services provided by Prometric.
One can easily grasp the relevance of this story. Recall that Pearson pulled the plug on at-home language testing in China back in 2023 for the same reason. Shortly thereafter they quietly eliminated at-home testing entirely.
Updated IELTS Test Stats Now Available
IELTS test statistics for 2024/25 are now available (I think they were published earlier this month). Interested readers can now access updated demographic and test taker performance data. Nothing unusual caught my eye, but let me know if you see something interesting.
Transparency in Testing
There is an excellent article in the Review of Education by Nathaniel Owen and Ananda Senel about enhancing transparency in high stakes English tests. I encourage everyone to check out the whole thing, but I want to jump to the end of the article, which includes a few recommendations for test makers. I’ll paraphrase them below (forgive me for any errors in comprehension). They call for:"
Increased transparency when it comes to how much time is allocated to test takers. This means explaining the rationale behind the amount of time given, and suggesting how test takers can handle time-related limitations.
Better communication regarding technology and related quality assurance. This includes clear system requirements and troubleshooting instructions.
More streamlined communication with test centers and with test takers. This includes clear in-test instructions and explanations of features, like adaptivity, which can sometimes be complex.
Increased cultural and linguistic accessibility. This could include providing instructions in local languages for test center staff, and recognizing the challenges that test takers might have with accent variety.
Transparent communication of how fairness is embedded in test design.
Accurate resources that clearly explain the demands of the test and demystify it in a general sense.
These are pretty solid recommendations. Nobody is doing all of them right now, but experienced test watchers will probably recognize that the tests which are on the upswing in terms of market share are doing more of them than the tests which are on the downswing.
I think most of us will agree that test takers often struggle to decode the requirements of their chosen test. I’ve written here how the TOEFL scoring rubric tells test takers to use “a variety of syntactic structures.” I am a great admirer of Professor Chomsky, but this is not a useful phrase when it comes to a scoring rubric.
I’ve also written about how – with a few exceptions – at-home testing has been pretty frigging terrible. Test takers are regularly told that their tests have been terminated due to reasons that the test owner won’t actually reveal to them. Remote proctors seem to enforce rules in a haphazard way, depending on whether or not they actually know what they are. At least one at-home test has included on-screen instructions requesting that its rules be broken. This is not transparency.
People who have been reading my work the longest will recall the “Saga of the Altruism Question,” which is pretty much my origin story as a commenter on testing. I won’t go into it here, but do encourage you to revisit the linked blog post. In some way, transparency has been the throughline of everything I’ve written over the past 15 years.
There is no regulatory body ensuring transparency in language testing, so test makers can be as transparent or as opaque as they like. But if they want to stand out in an increasingly competitive field, increased transparency is probably a smart choice.
Me on Livestream
Here’s me on the TEFL Development Hub Livestream.
Duolingo’s Interactive Writing Task
Here’s a post from the official Duolingo English Test blog about the DET’s multistage interactive writing task. It summarizes a long article in Language Testing. Twenty-five page explorations of individual tasks give me great joy.
The article explains that this task is an attempt to address the fact that “most large-scale writing assessments do not reflect real-world and classroom-based composing, where writers develop their ideas over multiple drafts.”
In the DET’s task, test takers are first given an initial prompt on a specific topic. Next, AI is used to identify which pre-identified themes the test taker’s response has addressed. Finally, a follow-up prompt is presented which asks the test taker to address one of the themes they have not touched on. It’s slightly more nuanced than my summary suggests, but I think you get the point.
On the livestream linked to above, I talked about how some test takers prefer human interlocutors because they can potentially tease out their English skills with follow-up questions, making it possible for them to get full credit for their fluency in the language. Here we have a style of item that could perhaps replicate the same effect in writing assessment. The authors note that “[w]ith the advancement in AI technology, Interactive Writing using prompting that is specifically keyed to the content of an initial response offers greater opportunities for measuring test takers’ full writing abilities…”
Scenario Based Language Assessment
Here’s a video from Soo Hyoung Joo of Columbia University about her work on scenario-based language assessment. It describes how an AI character can help test takers deal with a scenario (about physics, in the example case). The performance and collaboration of the test takers can then be observed and assessed.
English Tests and Foreign Currency Loss
A new article from Vientnam.vn touches on the issue of “foreign currency loss” stemming from widespread use of international English tests for domestic university admissions in Vietnam. It estimates that in 2025 over 300,000 IELTS tests will be taken in that country. Each administration of the IELTS costs VND4,664,000 (about $177 USD), the majority of which is said to flow outside of the country. The author also touches on how the cost of test preparation exacerbates this issue.
A domestically developed alternative to the IELTS, known as the VSTEP, is available but not widely accepted or used. Vietnam is one of a few markets where IELTS testing volumes are still increasing year after year.
In earlier posts I’ve written about how Seoul National University in Korea developed the TEPS Test partially due to concerns that overuse of the TOEFL and TOEIC tests for domestic admissions were leading to currency outflows at a particularly sensitive time (the late 1990s IMF Crisis). By all accounts, the TEPS Test successfully reduced the use of foreign tests for domestic purposes. Eventually, universities were blocked from using tests in this way and this all became a non-issue.
Interestingly, ETS has long been blocked from selling its “TPO” practice tests for the TOEFL directly to consumers in Korea. Instead, they must be purchased via a local partner. This was a big deal in the earliest days of the TOEFL iBT test before the development of a robust network of domestic prep providers.
Connecting English Scores to Academic Outcomes
Some readers might be interested in an article by Maggie McGehee and Daniel Isbell which will appear in a future installment of “Studies in Language Testing.” It examines the relationship between English test (DET, TOEFL, IELTS) scores and academic outcomes at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM).
According to the article, “mean GPAs and proportions of student withdrawal/probation were similar for the DET and other tests (or no test), and no differences among them were statistically significant.”
I was happy to see the authors note that “[f]or students admitted unconditionally with higher ELP scores, there were no statistically significant correlations between ELP scores and first year GPA.”
As has been discussed in this space, there are many things which impact student outcomes. The authors note the existence of students with really high ELP scores, but surprisingly low GPAs. Go figure.
Interestingly, though, it is mentioned that “[f]or those admitted conditionally, with ELP scores reflecting a lower range of English proficiency, stronger, positive, and statistically significant correlations emerged for students submitting IELTS or TOEFL scores, with low or negative (but not statistically significant) correlations for DET takers.”
It is pointed out a few times that the sample size was pretty small, so further study is needed.
There is also some good stuff in here about the business of English testing, but I’ll touch on that in another post. Check out Table 1 for a preview, though. You’ll spot which tests are frequently used… and which are not.
I Took the iTEP Test!
I took the iTEP test a few weeks ago. You can find some comments over on the blog.
Picture of the Week
Great insights