I attended two recent online events hosted by ETS. At an ETS EMEA event, I learned that:
- The new Official Guide to the TOEFL will be published in January.
- Questions in the reading section of the new TOEFL are not all weighted equally. Some are worth more than others.
Update: The New Official Guide won’t be published ’till August 2026, according to Amazon. But ETS is selling a “pocket edition” of the guide on a temporary basis. E-book only.
At the ETS Japan event about AI and human scoring last week, I asked again about the use of AI scoring on the new TOEFL. I hesitate to mention it (because the TOEFL team seems apprehensive about this issue) but I got the clearest suggestion yet that ETS will not send every test taker response to a specific human rater for scoring. This will be a tough row to hoe as ETS has spent the past five years extolling the virtues of having humans individually score every response. Anyway, I could be wrong; maybe they’ll stick with humans for the long run or on a transitional basis for the first few months of the test.