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.
