Late Scores and Deadlines

Posted on by TOEFL Resources

One of the biggest struggles that students have had with standardized testing in the pandemic era is meeting application deadlines.

Test-takers often feel lost at sea when deadlines are looming, but test companies need extra time to review the validity of their scores.  This problem comes to a head in the winter, of course.

As a tutor and as someone who writes about this stuff, it can be quite frustrating for me to read reports of missed deadlines and academic careers put on hold when, to some extent, it seems like these problems could be avoided through additional staffing.

Last year I wrote about this problem in a very snarky way (even by my standards).  I was angry.

This year I’ll just let the test-takers speak for themselves. Below are a selection of Tweets from just this past week about missed and looming deadlines.  Note that these are only the Tweets that mention deadlines; I didn’t include complaints about late scores without mentions of deadlines.

I included one comment from Reddit at the end since it seemed insightful.

And one lonely Redditor:

I took the GRE on November 4th and my scores are still under administrative review, which seems to be pretty common based on what I’ve seen here and on Twitter. I’ve left at least three voicemails, sent like ten emails, and DMed ETS on Facebook and Twitter, but nobody will respond to me/give me any useful information. This was my second time taking the GRE and I had apps due 12/1. I emailed with the schools to let them know the situation and also sent them my old scores, but these newer ones were much better, and the old scores didn’t arrive until after 12/1. It seems like the “administrative review” issue is worse this year than before, does anyone else have any insight into wtf is going on at ETS?

I’m really hoping that if this is a super common problem this year, my app won’t get dinged for the lower scores, ugh.

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