Some TOEFL speaking raters have started an online petition in response to issues they have faced in recent months. As regular readers know, scoring of TOEFL speaking responses is now done by raters based in India. Before the offshoring process began at the end of last year, scoring was done exclusively by US-based employees of ETS who worked from their own homes.
According to the petition, US-based raters are asked to provide their availability to ETS as usual, but are given no actual shifts. They struggle to get answers to questions about why this is happening.
The petition’s authors are asking for:
- A clear, honest explanation of how shifts are being assigned.
- A detailed accounting of how many U.S.-based raters have been scheduled to score since April 2025 and ratios of US raters and the new “global” pool since December 2024.
- Acknowledgment that the Rater and Scoring Leader roles are now being filled exclusively from India.
- An ethical review of these decisions and their impact on the long-standing U.S. rater pool.
- A commitment to transparency, accountability, and professional respect for this workforce.
The authors of the petition note that “we’ve given years—some of us decades—to this work. We helped build and uphold the standards that ETS still promotes publicly. We deserve better than ghosting, lip service, and erasure.”
Some readers might be interested in this video wherein an ETS official describes the ongoing offshoring and outsourcing of functions once done in-house by ETS. Some of these functions (customer service, scoring, proctoring) are now done by staff provided by Firstsource, which describes itself as “a trusted outsourcing partner to the world’s leading brands.”