There is a new ETS Research Report that looks into how university staff know about the TOEFL test. It focuses on three groups of stakeholders – admissions officers, faculty in graduate programs and faculty in Intensive English Programs.

The report is fun because I’ve always assumed that the amount known by everyone involved is “not much.”

While that’s true of graduate faculty, it seems that admissions officers know something of the test. They self-report a decent amount of knowledge. It’s true that 67% of those surveyed reported that their institutions accept the paper-based TOEFL (which was discontinued in 2017) but there have been a variety of other paper-based products since then.

I did chuckle at the following:

“…in fact, some respondents referred to levels of proficiency in terms of the original TOEFL scale (e.g., “we look for a 550 TOEFL score”). “

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