My copy of the new TOEFL iBT Premium from Barron’s just arrived.

I was really lucky to have the opportunity to contribute a little bit to this edition (the 18th). My job was mainly to revise the integrated writing questions and make them a bit more accurate. I also fact checked the boring stuff (payment methods, acceptable IDs, whiteboard rules, supported operating systems, score arrival times, etc) that most people don’t read (but really should read).

I think regular users of this book will really appreciate revisions to the practice reading tests, which have been tightened up quite a lot. The design of the questions more closely matches the look of the real test.

Pamela Sharpe has written every edition of this book, starting in 1978. If you want to know something about the history of the TOEFL program, she’s the one to ask.

Some may be interested to know that publication of the three official TOEFL books has been pushed back again. Per Amazon, they will be published on April 24. The bundles still have an April 22 street date, but I suppose that will be changed.

In other book news:

1. The 18th edition of Barron’s TOEFL will be released on April 2.
2. The print publication of “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize winning depiction of a TOEFL classroom, has been pushed back to June 25.
3. When I reduced the price of the Kindle version of my TOEFL writing book to a buck, sales increased ten-fold. But surprisingly, about half of the sales were of the print version, which had the same old price. Maybe this is a good tip for self-publishers. If you get some attention via a cheap ebook version, people who like the looks of the book will go ahead and get the paper version.
4. I was hoping that some of the sales would result in reviews on Amazon. Sadly, only one more person wrote a review. So, if you like the book, it would be cool if you could take a moment to write a few words on Amazon.

The Princeton Review is the first major publisher with a TOEFL book that matches the new format.  I ordered a copy for myself but, sadly, the new edition isn’t great.  It looks like the editors rushed the book to market and left the job of updating it half finished.

Practice questions for the new “Writing for Academic Discussion” question are present in the new edition.  It’s clear that the editors created them by sort of “upgrading” the old independent writing questions with the required discussion stuff.  That’s fine.  But, strangely, the sample responses have not been updated to match the new task format.  They are all independent essays… some more than 300 words.

Similarly, the “core concept” and “cracking the writing section” chapters still teach readers how to write four-paragraph independent essays.  They’ve even got a big ol’ independent essay template… but none of that is relevant any more.

The upside?  Well, the book still has some good skill building stuff that is relevant to the rest of the test.  There are now two practice tests instead of one, but that necessitated the creation of a new integrated writing task which isn’t very good.  At first listen, I thought that PR had included the wrong audio track, but eventually I figured out that the question was just poorly constructed.

Anyway.  I don’t recommend this one. Princeton Review issues a new edition every year so I’ll check in again in 2025.

If you desire to have a copy of the book, it is available via Amazon.

Here are a few words I scribbled down for LinkedIn the other day, re: Stanley Kaplan’s autobiography.

The book is short and needlessly self-congratulatory, but I do recommend it to people who want to know how prep schools for standardized tests came into existence.  Kaplan’s importance comes from his revolutionary idea that students could study for standardized tests like the SAT and MCAT…  and that studying could lead to significantly higher scores.  To the contemporary reader that sounds like common sense, but when Kaplan went into business in 1938 the College Board had already spent years claiming the opposite to be true.  They maintained that stance for decades as Kaplan’s business continued to grow. Curiously, both parents and educators bought into it. I’m not quite sure why, and Kaplan’s biography isn’t scholarly enough to suggest a reason. The College Board (and ETS) only softened their position in 1978 (!!) following an FTC investigation into standardized testing.

It’s important to note here that Kaplan REALLY liked tests and sincerely believed that they were a valuable part of the university admissions process.  He makes a pretty decent case for the argument that tests (especially in the 1940s and 50s) helped schools to identify students with the potential for greatness.  This contrasts with his competitors over at The Princeton Review who seem to have loathed the tests they helped students cram for.

Speaking of Princeton Review, there is a heckuva lot in here about Kaplan’s feud with those folks.  That seems to be a grudge he took all the way to the grave.

I admit that I flippantly use the phrase “Stanley Kaplan Syndrome” (coined by David Owen) to refer to test prep “experts” whose “yearning for legitimacy” gives them curious ideas about the value of their work beyond the test sitting.  I may scale back my usage of that term as Kaplan seems to have been a pretty decent dude.

A final note. When I am rich and go on a tour of famous sites in the history of testing, I will certainly pop into the former headquarters of Kaplan in Midtown Manhattan (which is still used by Kaplan, probably because they sold off the air rights to their neighbors).  But what I really want to do is find the location of the first Kaplan school.  It was apparently somewhere near the King’s Highway Subway Station in New York.  If anyone here has an address for it, please let me know. I can excerpt the pages in the book that describe it.