No book recommendations today.  Sorry.  My personal reading was mostly fiction this month.  But, as usual, I did plow through a few magazines. 

First up, I read the September issue of “History Today.”  I enjoyed:

Next, I read the October issue of the same magazine.  In that one, I liked:

Both of these magazines contain a lot of great long-form articles… but alas they are for subscribers only.

Finally, I read the  Fall 2021 issue of Modern Dog (oh yes I did).  I spotted:

I think I’ve got one more issue of “History Today” and one more issue of “Modern Dog” coming before my subscriptions run out. Stay tuned!

Continue reading “You Should Read More – Part 15 (of 100)”

According to yesterday’s earnings call, revenue for the Duolingo English Test in Q3 2021 was $6,695,000. At $49 a pop, we might extrapolate that the test was taken 136,000 times in July/Aug/Sept. The actual number is probably a bit higher than that due to discounts and freebies.

This is up from $5,607,000 in Q3 2020.

Here are the historic revenues:

Q3 2021 – 6,695,000  
Q2 2021 – 4,833,000
Q1 2021 – 5,035,000

Q4 2020 – 4,197,000
Q3 2020 – 5,607,000
Q2 2020 – 4,598,000
Q1 2020 – 753,000

Update:  I found Q4 2020 numbers!

Okay, so here’s my report on changes to the TOEFL Bulletin between July 2021 and October 2021.

I’m only going to list substantive changes (and ones that make me chuckle). Most of these relate to the new Paper Edition of the test, of course.

Page 5: The TOEFL iBT is now accepted at 11,500 institutions (up from 11,000)!

Page 5:  Test centers are no longer described as “ETS approved.”  They are now described as “authorized.”  This one made me chuckle a lot.

Page 5:  The Home Edition is now in China!

Page 5:  The Paper Edition exists!

Page 6:  Instructions for getting a large-print copy of the Bulletin from ETS Disability Services were removed.  This makes me sad.

Page 7: The Bulletin no longer recommends contacting ProctorU by email or live chat if you have problems immediately before the test.  Wise.

Page 10: You cannot register for the Paper Edition on the app.

Page 11:  The Bulletin no longer recommends getting “the most current information” in the app.  Now they just tell you to use the website.  Smart.

Page 12:  More paper edition stuff.  I can’t really summarize it all here, but I’ve blogged on it here and there.  But note that there is no score review process for the Paper Edition.  This is interesting.  I am not totally sure why that is.

Page 13:  The “returned payment fee” is now listed in the chart.  But I think the amount is the same.

Page 13:  It now lists Australia, Canada, Colombia, Nigeria, Turkey and the United States as jurisdictions where taxes are added to the price of the test at checkout. That matches what I reported in August.

Page 13: Fee increase! We have a fee increase!  There’s a fee increase over here! The “declined payment” fee has increased from $20 to $30.

Page 16:  There is a reminder to check your equipment before taking the home edition.

Page 18:  In India you can use your Aadhaar card.  But damn it, someone needs to tell all the proctors about this change.  I’ve gotten too many reports about it being rejected on test day.

Page 21:  A bunch of new ID notes for Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, India, and the EU.

Page 27:  Score cancellation stuff for the Paper Edition.

Page 27: Note that refunds are now provided in the currency you paid for the test in.  Previously, refunds were in US dollars.

Page 29:  Important change!  Important change! Score reports are sent to recipients “within 11 business days.”  Previously this was done “within 11 days – or sooner.”

Page 34:  The bulletin now says that scores can be cancelled by ETS “when, in its sole judgement, there is substantial evidence that the score is invalid. Scores can be cancelled as a result of test taker behavior or irregularities that affect testing integrity.”  Yeah.

Page 35:  There is a line about how frequent reuse of testing devices and locations could cause score delays and cancellations… and your eligibility to take future exams.

 

The third quarter earnings call for Duolingo will stream live tomorrow (November 10). I won’t watch the livestream since I’m not a shareholder (too poor) but I imagine it will include the latest registration numbers for the Duolingo English Test.

In case you are wondering, there were 340,000 registrations for the DET in 2020. There were slightly less during the 12 months ending in June of 2021.

In comparison, the TOEFL iBT Home Edition was taken about 500,000 times between March 2020 and some undisclosed time in the recent past (according to a recent webinar for stakeholders).

Many users have recently reported problems logging into their TOEFL accounts. This is probably because they also have a GRE account. I’ve been reading daily reports of this for the past 2.5 weeks.  It took me until today to reproduce it myself.

Here is a description of the problem and a couple of solutions.

You cannot be signed into both your TOEFL account and your GRE account at the same time. If you try to log in to your GRE account when you are already logged into your TOEFL account you will get this error:

“It appears that you have encountered a glitch with our Sign In system”

If you try to log into your TOEFL account when you are already logged into your GRE account you will get this error:

“authnsvc.ets.org took too long to respond.”

Solution 1:

To permanently avoid this problem you should manually log out of the other account. Don’t just close the window, but actually click the “sign out” button. Each time you finish using your TOEFL or GRE account you should manually sign out of it.

Solution 2:

You can also try using an incognito or private browser window to log in.  But you will have to repeat this every time you want to log in.

Solution 3:

Resetting your password may also work, but the same bug may prevent you from accessing the reset password page.

Sometimes none of these solutions will work.  I’m sorry.  If that happens you should call ETS.  Students have reported that their customer support team has been able to solve the problem.  Contact info for ETS is available over here.

 

(This post was updated January 20, 2022)