News Roundup: October 22 to November 11
IELTS on assessment literacy, Garcia named ETS President, ETS cuts 757 more jobs, IDP named a takeover target, British Council selling "everything," Oxford to stop accepting TOEFL... and more!
IELTS Partners on Assessment Literacy
The IELTS partners have published a new guide to assessment literacy and picking English tests. It’s pretty good.
They suggest asking five questions:
Is there research to support test validity?
How are speaking and writing assessed?
How do your tasks align with academic demands?
What security measures are in place?
Is it possible to review how test taker performance is assessed against specific criteria?
These are all excellent questions. Score users should certainly ask them. One might also read Goodine’s Guidelines.
From a business perspective, these questions seem to highlight how IELTS Official continues to find itself in a tight spot. They are dealing with competition from more contemporary tests like the PTE Academic Test and Duolingo English Test which are successfully putting forth the argument that shorter items (what IELTS calls “limited-response items”) have a role to play in snapshotting the language proficiency of an applicant (even if only in combination with longer items). On the other hand, they also face competition from fairly traditional tests like LANGUAGECERT which, as recent events have suggested, may be supported by much more stringent security measures than is the IELTS.
ETS Cuts 757 More Jobs
The Educational Testing Service will lay off 757 employees at the end of the year. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, this comes as Measurement, Inc takes over the scoring of several tests included in ETS’s longstanding CAASPP-ELPAC contract.
That contract, which runs through 2027, is quite lucrative for ETS, though it is surprising how much of the work appears to be carried out by subcontractors. For instance, for the fiscal year ending September 2023, Cambium Assessment was paid 26.8 million dollars for subcontracted services associated with the contract.
I suppose these workers are getting slightly better treatment than TOEFL raters, who (according to reports) have seen their shifts dry up without getting actual termination notices. Combined, though, it seems like something close to a thousand jobs cut. That’s hard times.
Below is a copy of the WARN notice sent to the State of California. I put on my fake journalist hat last week and requested a copy. Note that although the notice was filed in California, the workers are based around the USA.
Garcia Confirmed as ETS President
ETS has finally confirmed the appointment of Janet Garcia as president of ETS. Garcia currently serves as CEO of PSI Services, a position she will continue to hold as she takes the reins at ETS.
CEO Amit Sevak will remain with ETS, perhaps with more time to devote to public speaking engagements.
It may be worth keeping an eye on the masthead over on the ETS website to see if any other roles change hands in the days ahead.
IDP Education Holds Annual General Meeting
You can read a transcript of IDP Education Ltd’s Annual General Meeting right here. It’s mostly quite dull, but I suppose it is interesting to see how IDP’s future depends on governments becoming more open to immigration in the near future. That’s a dicey proposition in a world where voters around the globe are becoming more nativist and more nationalist with every passing day.
IDP Education: Takeover Target?
Meanwhile, a new research brief from Macquarie Analysts places IDP Education at the top of a list of 16 likely takeover targets. As noted in the Australian, “private equity firms have been on the march this year in terms of privatisations of ASX-listed companies.” IDP is mentioned as a likely target due to steep declines in its share price over the past year (though they aren’t actually as steep as indicated in the article).
Over the years, many test watchers have observed the IELTS Official partnership, and wondered how its dysfunction might be increased. To me, handing one third of the partnership over to a private equity fund could be the best possible approach. An American fund would be the most efficient choice, of course, but a domestic fund would certainly do in a pinch.
British Council Selling “Everything”
It seems that the British Council isn’t making much progress in its quest to get the £197mn it owes to the FCDO written off. In the meantime, they are making cuts and selling assets. Speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee a few days ago, CEO Scott McDonald said:
“…we are now selling everything the British Council has that we are able to sell. I talked about estates last time; we have 42 properties around the world and we are selling, or attempting to sell, every single one that is possible to sell. We are selling that bit of the art collection that we are able to sell under the terms of the museum code. We sold the school we had in Madrid. We do not have anything else.”
That school in Madrid, by the way, was sold for £50 million. It had been operated by the British Council since the 1940s. But even accessing the proceeds of the sale is proving to be tricky.
Test watchers might be asking if McDonald really is in the process of selling “everything” that can be sold. Given that the British Council’s IELTS operations in India were sold to IDP Education for £130 million just a few years ago, some might be wondering if we might see the rest of their IELTS business on the auction block in the near future.
The answer is: probably not.
Per the current agreement between all three IELTS partners (Cambridge, BC and IDP) the partners can only sell or transfer their share to one of the other founding partners. The British Council couldn’t, for instance, sell its IELTS business to a deep-pocketed competitor like Pearson or PeopleCert.
Meanwhile, IDP isn’t in a position to acquire expensive assets right now, especially one that might come with a price tag that exceeds its current market cap. And Cambridge, it is safe to assume, is content to continue developing the test while collecting a lucrative per-test fee from administrations carried out by the other partners.
Intelligibility and Comprehensibility Research
New from Studies in Language Assessment is an article by Daniel Isbell, Dustin Crowther, Jieun Kim and Yoonseo Kim which looks at the speaking tasks included in British Council’s Aptis Test. Specifically, it compares official Aptis scores to assessments of intelligibility and comprehensibility from laypeople recruited from the “Prolific” online research participant pool. Scored responses from 50 test-takers were selected and those participants rated their comprehensibility on a 1-9 scale. For intelligibility, the participants were asked to transcribe the recordings. Those transcriptions were compared to criterion transcripts created by the research team. Among other things, the authors note that “to the ears of layperson listeners… speakers that earned higher Aptis scores were more intelligible and easier to understand.”
I would love to see more of this kind of research. I suppose a similar study could be done of test-taker responses to just about any English test.
I Took the GateWay Test
I took the Gateway English Test from English3 a few days ago. I had a lot of fun with it. I’m not a psychometrician, so I can’t evaluate the validity of items, but I was happy to see that the English3 team put some thought into designing interesting tasks. There are some negative points, but I’ll save those for the end of this post, lest anyone gets the wrong idea about me.
A few notes:
This is a 90-minute test with a $99 price tag. Proctoring is asynchronous, which I guess puts it in the “contemporary affordable” quadrant with DET and PEXT. Results come in five days or you can pay extra to get them more quickly.
The test includes meaningfully integrated tasks! They include listening to a lecture and answering a question about it orally, listening to a conversation and giving an opinion about it in writing, and listening to a “zoom” call and summarizing each of the speaker’s points in writing. These are fun.
Content is mostly “academic” with some “campus life” stuff. I didn’t spot any non-campus “daily life” content. Reading and listening passages resemble what you might find on other tests.
Since this is a 90-minute test, there is still time for a complete essay. Indeed, there is quite a lot of written and spoken production. The 90-minute length gives designers room to include quite a lot of speaking and writing, if that’s what they value. Going with a 90-minute length is a tough decision in a world where 60-minute tests seem to be the future… but that extra half hour does give designers a certain amount of freedom.
The test uses the same on-screen note-taking widget as the ITEP. I like that.
The test starts with 5 unscored speaking questions. Responses are shared with score users.
The list of accepting schools seems to skew toward faith-based institutions, which is really interesting. While taking the practice test I sort of sensed content that might appeal to the CLT folks, but didn’t pick up on any of that in the actual test.
One almost senses that if the TOEFL team had a bit more time to think about their relaunch, they might have come up with a product sort of like this one. This is a fun, non-threatening test that includes an extended writing task, a ton of speaking, meaningfully integrated tasks and a splash of “campus life” stuff.
Meanwhile, some of the not-good stuff:
Security seems dated. This is an asynchronously proctored test that utilizes neither a secure browser nor a secondary camera. I think institutions expect a bit more in 2025.
Scoring is wonky. The maximum score is supposed to be 600 points. I scored 605 points. My listening score was 680/600. Whoops.
Instead of linking my scores to the CEFR, my score report just contains the letters “CEFR.” Hmmm.
Remember the APIEL Test?
While I was searching the warrens of the College Board’s website, I stumbled upon something I didn’t know I needed: this technical manual for the AP International English Language Test! Developed for the College board by ETS and offered from 1997 to 2002, the APIEL Test was used by some schools in the United States alongside TOEFL and IELTS to confirm English fluency when admitting international students.
Testing enthusiasts might find the content of the manual somewhat interesting. This was a three-hour test (plus time for instructions) and if you squint at it long enough you can see how it may have been influenced by research being done in support of the TOEFL iBT. For instance, this was the first ETS test with both a speaking section and a writing section. Meanwhile, in true AP fashion, the reading and listening items are sourced from real-world publications rather than the somewhat stilted constructions we see in tests today. I even spotted an uncredited excerpt from “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.”
Perhaps some readers of this space contributed to the development of the test and have some memories to share.
This test actually came up in a conversation I had at DETcon 2024; another attendee reminisced about how ETS held similar events in the 90s to promote the product. Recall that back then ETS ran most of the College Board’s testing programs.
This seems to have been the College Board’s only foray into the world of high stakes English testing (aside from their early management of the TOEFL). I’ve often wondered if they have ever considered getting into this market. There is still some potential for profit, I think. Just off the top of my head I can count TEN firms trying to make money on high stakes testing for college admissions in the UK, but only four trying to profit from the much larger US market.
Duolingo Q3 Results
Duolingo published Q3 results last week. Revenue from the Duolingo English Test amounted to $9,649,000 for the quarter. If we divide that number by the cost of taking the test ($70) we get a total of 137,842 tests for the quarter. That’s a decline of 17% compared to the same quarter last year. This figure tracks with what we’ve seen so far this year: Q1 was down 17% and Q2 was down 12%.
Just keep in mind that this is a rough estimate, as some people pay less for the test by purchasing a bundle and others pay more for the test by purchasing express scoring. Others pay nothing at all by using a waiver from the Duolingo Access program (25k waivers were distributed last year).
How does this compare to the industry as a whole? By my data, PTE volumes were down 10% in the first half of 2025, while IELTS volumes at IDP were down 11% for the first half of 2025.
IDP will publish a new half-year report in February.
We might learn about IELTS volumes at the British Council if they publish their annual return in January, as required (but they probably won’t). ETS doesn’t publish TOEFL test volumes, but keep an eye out for the release of the organization’s annual audit in early January.
UVIC to Accept Duolingo English Tests
The University of Victoria will accept Duolingo English Test scores starting in May of next year. I think they were the largest non-accepting school in Canada last time I did a scan of Canadian institutions.
Duolingo Room Scan: It’s Fine
I finally got around to experiencing the new room scan for the Duolingo English Test. The room scan is mostly painless. It resembles that of the British Council’s EnglishScore test: the test taker just has to slowly spin around their room while holding the secondary camera (their phone). There is also a second scan, which hasn’t been discussed much in this space. To complete it, the test taker first points the phone at their keyboard, and slowly moves it towards the space behind their computer. It is a little clunkier than the main room scan, and the test taker might attempt it a couple times before doing it properly.
Some have argued that requiring test takers to have a compatible smartphone is burdensome. This is true, to a certain extent. That said, many test takers will find that it alleviates the burden of completing room scans by carrying a laptop around their apartment. Remember that most test takers don’t have a cool-guy Macbook like the people who design and market tests. Instead, they have a barbell of a Windows machine with a bunch of peripherals connected via USB and a battery that has to be plugged in all the time because it maxes out at a 5% charge. Doing a room scan with such a machine really sucks. Ask me how I know.
Oxford Rejecting New TOEFL (For Now)
Officials at the University of Oxford have posted the following note on the school’s website:
“Changes to the TOEFL iBT test are being introduced on 21 January 2026. The University will not accept TOEFL tests taken from that date to meet the English language condition until a review of the revised test has been completed.”
It is unclear when this review will be completed.
TOEFL Score Report Oddity
Some folks have reported being charged $39 (each) to send additional TOEFL score reports. It currently costs only $29 when I try to send scores from my account. I don’t know if ETS is doing an A/B test, or if someone in Gurgaon pressed the wrong button.
No More Free Paper TOEFL Score Reports?
According to the TOEFL Naver blog, in January ETS will end the practice of sending paper score reports to test takers at no charge. Currently, score reports are mailed to all test takers at no extra cost when the request is made at the point of registration, with express shipping available for an additional fee. Come January, only express shipping will be available.
Based on the current fee schedule, that means test takers who need a score report will be asked to pay an additional $25 at the point of registration, or $60 if one is requested after the test.
Social media posts suggest that there is still quite a lot of demand for paper score reports. They also suggest that standard (free) delivery is unreliable in a lot of places. And that most test takers are unaware that those usually come in through their national postal service.
Some test takers will be unhappy about paying more (per recent price hikes) and getting less. On the other hand, there will be fewer cranky test takers complaining about not getting their score reports.
If memory serves, IELTS Official still provides paper score reports in many markets, but has begun phasing them out in certain instances. For example, the British Council no longer provides them to people who take the computer-delivered IELTS in Korea. Pearson and Duolingo, meanwhile, do not provide paper score reports at all.
Following this change, LANGUAGECERT may be the only firm that still provides a paper score report to all test takers at no extra cost.
Stray Thoughts on Test Volumes
Between June 2021 and June 2022, IDP Education administered about 1,900,000 IELTS tests. During that same period, Pearson administered about 591,000 PTE tests.
Between June 2024 and June 2025 IDP administered about 1,293,800 IELTS tests (a 600k drop). During that same period, Pearson administered about 993,000 PTE tests (a 400k increase).
This according to the annual reports published by each firm.
Apples and oranges, I suppose. But one is left to wonder when the number of tests administered by Pearson will surpass the number administered by IDP education. One is also left wondering if Pearson (which seems to focus on a narrower range of markets) already does more tests in India than IDP.
(By my crude calculations, DET jumped from 494k to 684k in the same time frame)
Picture of the Week
