Here are two images that have inspired me to write, again, about bad UX in English testing. First up is a section of the monthly “Search Performance” that Google sends me. It indicates that the top growing search query sending traffic to my site in November was “score not available TOEFL.” The second is a Reddit post from a guy who is “a bit freaking out” because his TOEFL score is “not available.”
So where’s the bad UX? Well…
When a test taker has just completed the at-home TOEFL and logs in to their account to check their scores, they’ll probably see a message like “status – checked in.” That’s a bit weird, since they are no longer checked in. But whatever.
A few days after that, when they log in the status will be updated to something like “Score Pending.” This is useful. “Pending” might not be the best verb for the audience at hand, but it makes sense.
A few days after that, when they log in, the status will have switched to “Score Not Available.” This is when some test takers start to panic. Little do they realize that this status is the normal interregnum state between “score pending” and the actual reporting of scores.
Good UX might involve eliminating all three statuses, and replacing them with something concise like “Scores will be available December 7, 2025.” Then again, I’m just a guy on the Internet who went to a test optional university. Maybe I’m missing something here.
A few additional notes:
- This has been the state of things since the introduction of the at-home TOEFL in early 2020.
- My three-year old blog post about this topic was viewed 1461 times in November. Semi-related blog posts scooped up a few hundred additional views. If my obscure WordPress blog attracted more than 1500 perplexed test takers in a single month, I shudder to imagine the time ETS spends on customer support contacts re: this issue.
- The Internet horde, which never fails to amuse, discovered long ago that if they right-click and use “inspect element” on a certain part of the “not available” box they can sometimes see what looks to be their scores in some sort of json structure before the official delivery from ETS.
- Another frequent question is “how do I download the PDF of my score report?!”. For that, test takers must wait an additional 24-48 hours after the scores are first reported. Only then does the download link appear in their account.