Here’s a mildly interesting thing that was spotted while in conversation with John Healy. It appears that while the TOEFL will maintain a 1-120 score scale for two years following the launch of the enhanced TOEFL (alongside the new 1-6 scale), it will not maintain 1-30 scores for each of the subsections. At least this is what the score report image and website verbiage suggest.
I suppose this makes it imperative that score users stay on top of their score requirements and update them as needed.
This topic came up as John and I were discussing TOEFL requirements set by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy for the licensing of foreign trained pharmacists. That organization has never required an overall TOEFL score… instead, they’ve just set increasingly picky section score requirements. Those requirements were revised just a few months ago. They will need to be revised again. And real soon.
Certification of foreign trained pharmacists might be the number one “niche case” for TOEFL scores. It is also a long-standing ETS monopoly.
Needless to say, all score users will need to be handled with kid gloves during the transition to a new TOEFL… but the NABP will need to be babied by ETS with particular care, or they might lose their monopoly. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the current iBT format maintained past the January cut-off date for cases like this one.
Speaking of which, if anyone from Michigan Language Assessment or Duolingo English Test or iTEP International wants a consult re: this case I’m happy to chat. I accept payment via PayPal or boxes of testing ephemera from the 1980s.
