While chatting with John Healy about the new test on Facebook (yes, there is still some chatter about English tests on Facebook), we got to talking about templates. I wrote:
“Here’s some interesting food for thought: After years of resisting, Pearson finally introduced human raters in order to kill off template usage in the PTE Test. Conversely, the new TOEFL will not make use of human raters for most responses. Some might argue that this will make templates even more effective than before.”
It is worth thinking about. Without human raters checking every single response, there is the chance that some test takers seek to game the test with heavy duty templates. This was the story of the PTE test for many years… until humans started checking almost every task.