The PTE Core Test can now be used to meet the language use requirement of the Alberta Advantage Immigration Program. Applicants may now submit scores from the IELTS (General), CELPIP, PTE Core, and a couple of French tests.
That’s pretty cool. Longtime readers know that I get pretty excited about competitive marketplaces and the extinguishing of monopolies.
This brings to mind a story from a few weeks ago. You may recall an item about how the CGFNS began accepting PTE scores from foreign nurses seeking visas for the USA in 2022. Pearson’s market share in this use case increased from 7% that first year to 50% in 2024. IELTS dropped from 84% to 35% over the same period.
It is worth mentioning here that the University of Edinburgh will stop accepting scores from the PTE for entry from 2026 onwards. I think this was announced in early March. You can read about it on their page.
The university stopped accepting scores from the at-home version of the PTE in late 2023 due to concerns around cheating. You can read a report about this from the PIE News. I’m not sure when the decision was made to stop accepting scores from the test center version as well.
The CGFNS (Commission for Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools) has rescinded its decision to raise its PTE speaking score requirement for foreign-trained nurses seeking work visas for the United States. The requirement will once again be a score of 50 (down from 63). This comes after other issuers of nursing certifications declined to follow the CGFNS’s lead on the issue.
This isn’t an industry I follow closely, but it appears the score requirement was increased in December due to concerns that nurses were entering the USA with limited speaking skills. According to the CGFNS, there was “an alarming increase in healthcare workers holding a lower speaking score over the past three years.”
Discussions with the US Department of Health are ongoing, however. Those may soon result in a mandate that all issuers of nursing certificates require higher scores.
There is some interesting data buried in the CGFNS announcement. It suggests that Pearson has captured much of this lucrative market.
From 2022 to 2024, the percentage of nurses submitting PTE scores to the CGFNS increased from 7% to 50%. The percentage submitting IELTS scores decreased from 84% to 35%.
Note that the CGFNS does what is known as visa screening based on score requirements set by the government. State regulatory bodies have their own requirements that regulate proof of language skills in each state which nurses must also adhere to following their arrival in the USA.
The cost of taking the PTE Academic Test was hiked in a bunch of countries last month. Here are the new prices in a few key markets (old prices in parenthesis):
Australia: AUD 475 (445)
China: USD 323 (317)
Canada: CAD 350 (340)
New Zealand: NZD 475 (445)
Pakistan USD 225 (220)
Turkey: TRY 8000 (5000)
Germany: USD 267 (260)
Japan: USD 235 (230)
Korea: KRW 300,000 (286,000)
United Kingdom: 220 GBP (200)
United States: USD 255 (245)
I noticed that the price list no longer includes any references to the PTE Online. That means certain countries (including Haiti, Paraguay and Timor-Leste) are no longer listed.
I read thatCalifornia State University – East Bay has updated its list of acceptable English tests for international students (note that each campus in the California State University system can set its own requirements). A few things are notable:
Pearson’s PTE Academic test has been added to the list.
Michigan Language Assessment’s MET has also been added. Good for them!
It is specifically mentioned that the DET, TOEFL Essentials, IELTS one-skill retake, and TOEFL MyBestScores are not accepted.
The university now accepts a handful of scores from tests not explicitly designed for this purpose. Namely: AP English (not sure which one), SAT Verbal (aka “reading and writing”), ACT English, and IB English.
I’m always curious about the use of things like the SAT and the ACT for the purpose of admissions. As mentioned above, they aren’t really designed for that purpose… and sometimes include less production than tests that are. Note that the SAT no longer includes an essay.
It is also worth mentioning that the there hasn’t been a “Verbal” section of the SAT for many years. Nor has there been a test called “AP English.” Cal State should do a bit better when it comes to terminology.
Fun fact: Between 1997 and 2002, ETS & The College Board did offer an Advanced Placement test designed with this purpose in mind – the AP International English Language test. It was affordable.
Pearson’sSarah Hughes gave a great webinar yesterday called “The Role of Automated, AI, and Human Scoring” (link). She discussed the ways in which Pearson spots what they call “Topic Templates” in the writing section of the PTE and what is done after they are detected. It was my first time to hear the term “topic templates” (as opposed to just “templates”), which is meant to distinguish between the memorization of typical discourse phrases and the memorization of a whole lot of generic junk into which a few topic-related phrases are plugged.
Pearson’s primary line of defense against topic templates seems to be a database of such templates created by a bot that crawls the web now and then. When signs of a template are detected in a student response, that response is sent to a human rater (or raters?) to determine if the answer is acceptable or should be given a score of zero. Note that most of the time human raters are not used to score the PTE writing section, which is handled entirely by AI.
I know I sound like a broken record every time this comes up, but I’d love to hear more about the detection of templates that aren’t widely circulated online. I’ve linked to it a million times, butSugene Kim’s article about preparing for the TOEFL test “Gangnam Style” is required reading for anyone interested in this topic.
The article describes how, here in Korea, students prepping for a test hire a hotshot tutor – one mentioned in Kim’s article is nicknamed “The Writing Sniper” – to craft a handful of bespoke templates just for them. The students don’t get just the templates, of course, but also receive weeks of lessons about how to use them most effectively. Needless to say, the templates don’t show up in any databases possessed by the testing firms.
When Kim’s article was published I had some fun creating my own topic templates for this task. They fooled a lot of people with experience in the industry. You can read about my fun in a four-part series of blog postsstarting over here.
The Gangnam approach somewhat suited the old TOEFL independent writing task, which had a lot of pretty formulaic questions like:
“Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? It is better to use printed materials such as books and articles to do research than it is to use the internet. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.”
It’s a bit less suitable for the IELTS, where the questions are sometimes (but not always) a bit more intricate. Like:
“In spite of the advances made in agriculture, many people around the world still go hungry. Why is this the case? What can be done about this problem?”
The PTE has also has somewhat intricate questions like:
“Tobacco, mainly in the form of cigarettes, is one of the most widely-used drugs in the world. Over a billion adults legally smoke tobacco every day. The long term health costs are high – for smokers themselves, and for the wider community in terms of health care costs and lost productivity. Do governments have a legitimate role to legislate to protect citizens from the harmful effects of their own decisions to smoke, or are such decisions up to the individual.”
Obviously the effectiveness of a topic template is blunted by the various aspects that the PTE and IELTS prompts the test taker to touch on. The PTE adds a firm word count limit to the mix which could further complicate things.
But the tests are still vulnerable. The hotshots are good at what they do. As they should be, considering the sky-high fees they sometimes command.
With that said, one is left wondering how the test makers detect templates that are not widely shared online and which are not reused by multiple students across numerous tests administrations. Without a relevant database and without human raters who might notice their stilted nature, Pearson likely requires an AI solution specifically designed to spot them. Is that part of the mix?
The continued use of human raters to score the IELTS might be an advantage, but I haven’t heard much from the IELTS partnership on this topic, even when it comes to widely circulated templates. Do they supplement the expertise of their humans with a database of templates each essay is compared to? Or are they entirely dependent on humans? Humans are good… but are they good enough to beat The Writing Sniper? That’s unclear.
I think it is also worth mentioning that such templates are best used by students with intermediate language skills who want to pass themselves off as advanced students. They have the ability to “fill in the blanks” of the templates with more than just a topic keyword, but with decent clauses or sentences. This makes detection trickier than you might expect.
Questions of equity linger in the back of my mind, as well. Do current detection methods focus on low-hanging fruit? Are they good at detecting low or no-budget test preppers who use stuff they find on social media but poor at stopping the techniques favored by preppers with a few thousand bucks to spend before taking a test?
Do share your own thoughts, if you have a moment. More on this in the future.
“PTE performed well against a tough market backdrop of tightening migration policies. While volumes declined 10% we grew the business and continued to gain market share.”
The PTE was taken just over 1.1 million times in the calendar year.
As for the future, the report indicates that:
“We expect PTE to decline due to a continuation of the challenging market backdrop, including upcoming elections in Australia and Canada, but remain confident in the medium-term outlook given demographic projections and our competitive strength. We will focus on continued expansion in the Middle East and Latin America markets, AI product enhancements and proficiency assessments.”
Pearson is coming in red hot this morning with a new advertising campaign that extols the virtues of the PTE’s AI scoring and raises some pointed criticisms of the human scoring used in other tests. The above link is to one of the campaign’s Instagram videos (which is way more effective than anything found in the Youtube component of the campaign). If you watch one Internet video today, this should be the one. It tugs at the heartstrings.
Some test takers who experience issues with human raters complain that they feel unheard and ignored. On social media and the other places test takers go to seek help, complaints about biased or impolite interlocutors are quickly brushed aside by experts who believe they know better. Time and time again, these test takers are basically told that their complaints are all in their head. It really gets my goat.
Personally, I love humans.* But I agree that giving a voice to individuals who feel they are disadvantaged due to bias is probably a smart way to market a test.
I think the PTE Academic Online was eliminated in December and I didn’t notice. Did anyone else notice? Was there an announcement?
I cannot register for the test via my Pearson account, and all references to it have been removed from the PTE website.
When I posted about this on LinkedIn, a connection wrote the following comment:
The Pearson Academic Online test started its discontinuation process way back in July 2023 (where test takers were reflected the booking appointments with a 60 day waiting time period, i.e. A test taker who logged into his portal to find the test dates in July 2023 was only able to book the test dates of September 2023).
During my conversation with one of their Business Development Manager (BDM) at an event in July 2023, I questioned them whether this was a bug and the possibilities of its resolution. To my surprise, the BDM said that PTE has decided to wrap up its at online tests in view of technical difficulties faced by test takers in terms of hardware (microphone and computer).
But the real story as per my opinion is that Pearson was well aware about the cheating malpractices that test-takers utilized to gain unfair advantage at their online tests. This was the time when Pearson Academic got its approval to be an accepted test for the Canadian SDS student visa pathway (August 2023) and I sincerely believe that in order to help the testing integrity and credibility of Pearson stay intact, they discontinued their testing programs.
As a sort of followup to my earlier post about VAT being added to TOEFL fees in the EU, Here’s what it costs to take some of the most popular English tests in France (all prices USD):
IELTS Academic: $269 (inclusive of tax)
PTE Academic: $270 (inclusive of tax)
TOEFL: $324 (inclusive of tax)
Prices look similar across the EU. The TOEFL is much more expensive in pretty much every EU country now that ETS has started collecting VAT (and passing the additional cost on to test takers).
I love my friends at ETS, but gee whiz the TOEFL is going to be a tough sell moving forward. Is it providing some special sauce that makes it worth the added expense? I’m not sure.
Anecdotally, it seems like ETS has begun 2025 with a really big promotional spend via Google Ads. I’m seeing a ton of banners promoting the TOEFL as a test for destinations outside the USA. TOEFL is also the headline sponsor of the upcoming PIE Live event in March. Setting aside the fact that the audience there is exactly who the TOEFL team doesn’t need to influence, that sponsorship must cost a pretty penny. Why bother spending so much money on promoting a test when you’ve got corporate policies kneecapping your potential in one of the biggest sending markets?
Who knows, who knows.
I suppose it is also worth mentioning that there are a bunch of new-ish tests (Password, LanguageCert, Kaplan, etc) with an average price somewhere close to $200. The DET costs $65.
I was quoted in this PIE News article by Polly Nash as saying that the arrangement between IDP and the NEEA in China is more seamless than what ETS and the British Council have. That might be an understatement.
Test prep people who don’t work with students in China may not realize that Chinese test takers don’t register for tests directly with the test makers like they do in the rest of the world. Instead, they are offloaded to NEEA websites. That organization handles the registration and payment.
It is worth mentioning at this time that the NEEA is the National Education Examinations Authority, which is an agency under the purview of the Chinese Ministry of Education. They also handle other foreign tests like the GRE, GMAT and CELPIP.
I will forever be curious as to why this arrangement exists. I assume that this was the only way that foreign tests were allowed to enter the lucrative Chinese market. Surely, in 2024, the test makers would prefer to handle registration themselves. I could be wrong.
To be honest, this arrangement doesn’t really seem to bother test takers in the country who I talk to. They tell me that they are used to it. Perhaps there are advantages. Prices in China are set in RMB and are not hiked as often as in other markets. And I’m sure they don’t get nearly as many payment errors as people in the rest of the world get.
That said, the arrangement means that things like UX depend on the best practices of the bureaucracy, and it limits upselling and other things that add value to test registration.
Needless to say, I’ll likely be forever curious about how IDP was able to dodge this requirement. For what it’s worth, Pearson seems to have also dodged it with the PTE.
Update: Registration for the IELTS via IDP has been halted since December of 2024. Maybe they didn’t figure out how to deal with the NEEA.
Below is a copy of my PTE Academic score report. For my full report on taking the test, click here.
I really like that the score doesn’t contain any personal information (mailing address, passport number, etc). That makes it easy to share online. My TOEFL report contains my home address and part of my passport number, so I have to manually censor it before sharing it.
My scores arrived about 45 hours after I completed the test. Interestingly, I got the standard “You’ve just completed your PTE Test” about five minutes before the scores arrived.
Note that PTE scores can be sent to an unlimited number of institutions at any time at no cost. That makes the PTE a more attractive option than the TOEFL test, which charges a hefty fee to send scores to institutions after the test has been taken (four score recipients can be selected for free before the test has been taken).
I didn’t get any unscored “summarize the conversation” or “respond to a situation” speaking questions. I guess those have been cycled out. The latter is used in the PTE Core test, if I remember correctly.
I didn’t use any “templated responses” when responding to test questions.
I didn’t get any videos in the listening section.
Let me know if you have any questions about the test.
I hope to take a different test in the next week or two. More on that later.
