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 summarized my experience taking the test a few days ago, but a few more things come to mind:

  1. 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.
  2. I didn’t use any “templated responses” when responding to test questions.
  3. 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.

I took the PTE Academic yesterday at the Herald Test Center near Apgujeong Station! A few notes while everything is fresh in my mind:

  1. Check-in was efficient and quick. The center’s equipment is modern and clean and there are dividers between each computer. The staff know what they are doing. A bathroom is across the hall. That said, it doesn’t really compare to the ultra-lux “Pearson Professional Center” near Seoul City Hall. If you have a choice, I do recommend utilizing that testing center.

 

  1. I appreciate how Pearson sends detailed instructions to help test takers find the test center. I received general directions, directions from both city airports, and directions from the main train station.

 

  1. I also remain a fan of the laminated “helpful suggestions” sheets passed out to test takers as they wait to enter the testing space. The sheets point out that it is never necessary to yell.

 

  1. The test center was full, just like when I took the PTE Core last month. This speaks to the growing popularity of the test in this market. It also suggests that the city could support a third test center.

 

  1. I took my time reading the pre-test instructions and let the clock run out while the speaking instructions were displayed. This made it possible to answer the most challenging speaking questions without hearing chatter from other test takers.  I’ll tell my students to do the same.

 

  1. Is the speaking section adaptive? Like when I took the CORE test, I didn’t get any “describe this picture” questions. I was only asked to describe graphs (sometimes tricky ones). I think I overheard one of the other testers describing an actual picture.

 

  1. Again:  I warn test takers to keep within the recommended word counts when writing responses.  There are penalties (sometimes serious ones) for exceeding them.  This makes the PTE unlike the TOEFL and IELTS tests.

 

  1. I know that the use of real-life audio snippets (from TV, radio, lecture halls, etc) is a selling point of the test, but I’m still not a fan of how the audio files are sometimes potato quality. Also: a couple of the recordings I heard, presumably taken from a TV broadcast, were accompanied by background music.

 

  1. I was happy to encounter a couple of very challenging reading and listening questions. Some of my answers were guesses.

 

  1. One of the reading questions was an “ultra-Britishism.” I’m fairly certain it depended on knowing one weird difference between British and North American English. I swore under my breath and chose the answer 99% of Americans would pick. I probably got that one wrong.

 

  1. Tutors: teach your students time management techniques.  Test takers will encounter both timers for individual tasks, and timers covering multiple tasks. I went in mostly blind and really had no idea how much time I could spend on each task.

 

  1. Interestingly, a message at the end of the test said my results would arrive in 5 days. Pearson generally provides results in 2 days.

 

I’ll share my scores in a future post.

 

IDP Education has joined the discussion on “templated responses.” Australasia/Japan head Michael James noted in an article shared to LinkedIn that:

“AI’s role in high-stakes language testing has gained attention recently, particularly after a computer-marked test revised its scoring process to include human evaluators. This change has ignited a debate on this platform about a computer’s ability to identify templated responses.”

James points out that:

“The importance of human marking in high-stakes English language assessment cannot be overstated. IELTS examiners are highly trained language experts who bring a nuanced understanding and contextual awareness that AI systems lack. They can discern not only the grammatical correctness and structural integrity of a response, but also the underlying intent, creativity, and coherence of the content. This real-time, human-centred approach aims to reveal a student’s true abilities and potential.”

His work refers to the “cautiously curious approach” that the IELTS partnership has used in the past to describe its approach to AI.

There is more worth quoting here, but it is probably best to check it out yourself at the link above.

Moving forward, I would love to hear more about the humans who do this sort of work. Not just the humans who rate IELTS responses, but those who rate responses in all sorts of tests. Who are they? What makes them “highly trained experts”? How do they discern X, Y, Z? Are they under pressure to work quickly? These are questions asked by not only score users, but (more important and more frequently) by test takers themselves.

It is worth sharing a few notes from a long article published by Pearson in the summer.  It provides more information about the topics discussed in Jarrad Merlo’s webinar about the introduction of human raters to the PTE tests.

The article describes how a “gaming detection system” has been developed to aid in the evaluation of two of the speaking questions and one of the writing questions on the PTE. This system gives each response a numerical score from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating the complete absence of gaming and 1 indicating significant evidence of gaming.

This numerical approach seems wise, as the lines between acceptable and unacceptable use of “templated responses” in a response are sometimes blurred.  In a future post, I’ll summarize some research from ETS that discusses this topic.

Meanwhile, Pearson’s article notes that:

“While more rudimentary systems may rely on a simple count of words matching known templates, PTE Academic’s gaming detection system has been designed to consider a number of feature measurements that quantify the similarity of the response to known templates, the amount of authentic content present, the density of templated content, and the coherence of the response”

The article goes on to describe how the results of the AI checks are passed along to human raters, to aid in their decision-making regarding the content of responses.  It notes that the newly-implemented system:

“enables raters to make better informed content scoring decisions by leveraging the Phase I gaming detection systems to provide them with information about the about the [sic] extent of gaming behaviours detected in the response.”

That’s fascinating.  I’m not aware of another system where human raters can make use of AI-generated data when making decisions about test taker responses.

The article notes that human raters will not check all written responses for templated content.  Checks of most responses will be done entirely by AI that has been trained on a regularly-updated database of templates discovered via crawls of the web and social media.

A challenge with this approach that goes unmentioned is the difficulty of detecting templates that don’t show up on the public web.  In my neck of the woods, students pay high fees to “celebrity” test prep experts who create personalized templates that are neither shared publicly nor repeated by future test takers.  This came up in an article by Sugene Kim which I’ll share in the comments.

Perhaps Pearson should go whole hog and bring in human raters for some or all responses in the writing section as well.

More on this in the days ahead.

The PTE Academic now has human raters!  I learned this in a webinar hosted by Pearson’s Jarrad Merlo. Moving forward, a human rater (or more than one?) will check all test taker responses to the “describe Image” and “retell lecture” questions.

Human raters will only grade responses in terms of content.  Other features (pronunciation, etc) will still be graded entirely by AI.

Previously, human raters were only used when the AI scoring engine determined that responses were anomalous.

This change seems to be part of an effort to reduce the use of “templated responses,” a term that Jarrad used at least 37 times in the presentation.

The last part of the webinar discussed what is meant by “templated responses” in the context of the PTE, but I had to teach someone how to take (some other) test, so I missed it.

Below are some images, taken from the presentation, that demonstrate how this works. You can catch a replay of the webinar right here.

 

 

 

I’m scheduled to take the PTE Academic Test on November 21 in Seoul. Let me know if there is anything I should keep an eye out for. I’ll take the test at the “Herald Test Center” in Gangnam, which I have never been to.

A few notes about the registration process:

  1. This test center offers the PTE-A four days a week, three times each day.
  2. There are two places to take the PTE in Seoul. The other is the Pearson Professional Center, where I took the PTE-Core last month.
  3. It took about five minutes to complete the registration process.
  4. I checked, and saw that there is no late booking fee in Korea. That’s nice. Just note that booking is halted 24 hours before the scheduled test time.
  5. The fee in Korea is 286,000 KRW, or about $204 USD. That makes it a little bit cheaper than the TOEFL (which costs $220 USD) and the IELTS (which costs 299,000 KRW). That said, I think the British Council has a November/December sale on right now, so you can take the IELTS for 279,000 KRW.

Big thanks to Pearson for providing a test voucher.

There are three more tests I would like to take before the end of 2024. But time moves at an unimaginable speed.

Eight months ago, I posted a short item here predicting that within 5-10 years, the big three commonwealth governments would begin accepting at-home English tests for visa purposes.  It remains one of the most widely-read things I’ve written.

With the termination of the SDS in Canada, I suppose my prediction has arrived ahead of schedule.  As things stand, Canada-bound students can now get a study permit without visiting a test center.

Maybe that’s not a huge deal, but the termination of the SDS also means that all tests are now on a level playing field.  Students are now free to pick any test that is accepted by their target school, without consideration of how it will impact the issuance of their study permit.

Previously, students opting for entrance via the SDS program took an IELTS, TOEFL, CAEL, CELPIP or PTE test.  And now?  They have a buffet of options to choose from.  Take the University of Toronto, which is apparently a nice school.  Undergrad applicants can meet language fluency requirements by submitting scores from the following tests:  C1 Advanced, C2 Proficiency, DET, COPE, IELTS, PTE and TOEFL.  They can also submit an IB literature result, or some qualifications from the UK that I’m not familiar with.  Whatever their choice, it won’t affect their study permit.

Yes, I know that technically this was always an option, as the SDS could be bypassed in favor of the slow stream, but few students in the key sending markets went that route.

Clearly, then, this change represents yet another challenge for the legacy testing firms.  But it also represents a challenge for Pearson and Prometric (developer of the CAEL and CELPIP tests). In my view it will be very difficult to convince a student in China to pay $300 to take the TOEFL or $310 to take the PTE when the DET costs $65 and will get them to Canada just as easily.  Likewise, it will be hard to convince a student in India to take a 165 minute IELTS when a 60 minute DET is just as good.

And decades of shabby customer service from legacy testing firms has left them without enough goodwill to convince test takers to stick with them during these trying times.

Some may wonder how legacy test makers will approach this challenge.  One strategy might be to pray daily that IRCC introduces a language test requirement into the study permit system, rendering moot all of the above.  That may happen.  Another strategy may be to focus mostly on testing students bound for graduate programs, where the DET doesn’t have widespread acceptance.  That could be a smart approach.

A more ambitious strategy would be to take this as an opportunity to innovate in terms of test content and item development.

Hear me out.

One reason why items on legacy tests seem to be set in stone is that the test makers are beholden to whatever research and validity studies they have submitted to gain acceptance by governments.  Any drastic changes to test design can result in that acceptance being revoked.  That’s why Australia’s Department of Home Affairs temporarily stopped accepting TOEFL scores starting in July of last year.

But with the shuttering of the SDS and the winding down of the SELT program in the UK, this isn’t as big a concern as it used to be.

The folks at ETS have little to lose and much to gain from reinventing the TOEFL as a cheaper, shorter and more consumer friendly test.  Doing so will no longer impact their relationship with IRCC.  And since the TOEFL isn’t accepted in the UK, they have nothing to worry about there.  Yeah, it would cost them Australia (again) but I don’t think the test is widely used by students heading to that country anyway.  And, heck, the aforementioned changes would likely increase use of the test among US-bound students.

The IELTS partnership is also looking at a brave new world right now, though changes to that test would be trickier to implement. Though they are in the same boat as ETS as far as Canada is concerned, they have much more to lose in Australia and (in the short term) in the UK.  But the HOELT is coming, and in a few years the IELTS partners will find themselves in a position where innovation is much easier to pull off.

With all that said, there is a fourth possible strategy.  That is, of course, to do nothing.

I spotted a couple of interesting comments about the PTE in the transcript of Pearson’s Nine Month Trading Update conference call (which happened at the end of October).  They suggest that PTE test volumes may be flat or slightly up on the year.  They also suggest that the PTE may be taking market share from competitors in the English testing market.

During the call, a fellow from Goldman Sachs asked: “could you give some colour on PTE revenues and volumes in Q3?

The response from Pearson was:

“On PTE, you will remember that volumes were down when we disclosed those at the half year. Revenue was down very slightly. In Q3, it did return to growth and so that indication I had given that it was likely to be down for the full year, it could be flatter, maybe even slightly up.”

More interestingly, a representative of Citigroup asked: “I would love some extra detail on whether you think you are taking share within the PTE, specifically talking about PTE, but whether you are taking share within the English language proficiency testing market.”

The response from Pearson was:

“…on the PTE topic that you asked about, Tom, again, without naming names, if you go and look at some of the competitive players in the space they will talk to you about meaningful late teens, 20% percentage reductions in testing volumes. That is what they’re seeing in the market overall. So the fact that actually Gio and the team delivered growth in PTE in the quarter in that kind of a market context, of course implies that we are taking share, and of course implies that we are executing in a very intense and focused way, which you can expect us to continue to do in the context of a market that is indeed subject to some of these policies in different countries. And we understand that market very well.”

Canada has ended the Student Direct Stream (SDS).  This program was introduced by IRCC in 2018 to provide expedited study permit processing from select countries, including the key sending countries of India and China.  

Applicants opting for the SDS route were subject to requirements beyond those in the regular non-SDS study permit application.  These requirements included a language test result.

Moving forward, all students must apply through the regular study permit stream.

Notably, the regular study permit stream does not require a language test score.  It merely requires a letter of acceptance from an institution.  Institutions set their own language test requirements and issue the LOA once applicants have fulfilled them.

In terms of language testing, one imagines that this change will generate business for Duolingo’s DET, which is widely accepted by schools across the country but was not accepted for use in the SDS stream.  It may reduce volumes of more expensive tests like the TOEFL, PTE and IELTS, scores from which were accepted as part of the SDS stream.

I suppose, though, that one should keep an eye on the specific requirements of the student permit program.  Perhaps a language test requirement will be added in the future.

Note that the Nigeria Student Express program has also been eliminated.  It was similar to the SDS.

I read that the PTE test turned 15 years old last week. The folks at Pearson have accomplished quite a lot since the launch of the test. They’ve played a part in the breaking up of old testing monopolies and have catapulted the PTE from an annual test volume of zero to about 1.2 million, according to the firm’s most recent annual report. By my math, that makes it the second biggest test in its category.

I’m probably the last person who should be writing about the success of the PTE, since I’ve been paying attention only for the past five years. But a few things come to mind when seeking to account for what has happened. The following list is mostly for the benefit of other test makers who are trying to catch up.

Said things are:

 

  1. Pearson is really good at government relations. Over the past 15 years, the company has enjoyed an enormous amount of success getting its tests accepted by the Canadian, Australian and UK governments. None of the other IELTS competitors come close. ETS’s TOEFL has actually lost governments in the same time frame.

 

  1. The PTE benefits from so-called “perceived easiness.” When I ask students why they took the PTE or some other non-legacy test, their response usually includes some variation of “it’s easier than XYZ.” Are the non-legacy tests actually easier? Probably not. Do these students have any idea what items on legacy tests actually look like? Definitely not. Why do they think the tests are easier? Good marketing, I suppose. It probably has something to do with positive user experience and test taker stress levels as well. This is controversial, but it is a big big factor.

 

  1. The PTE is not a fee-generating machine. Unlike the legacy test makers, Pearson doesn’t charge onerous fees for sending scores to institutions. It also includes generous rescheduling and cancellation policies (both things can be done without any fee at all more than two weeks before test day). Late booking fees are reasonable.

 

  1. PTE results come very quickly, usually within 48 hours. When I started teaching 15 years ago, students didn’t really care about getting results quickly. They took responsibility for their deadlines, and scheduled language tests well in advance. But today’s students are different.

 

  1. Pearson is not a student placement agency. This makes it easier for the company to build relationships with agents in key markets like India.

 

There are more factors (a whole post could be written about differing approaches to at-home testing) but I will leave it at that.

Below are photos of the endcap displays of TOEFL and IELTS books at the big Kyobo Books location near Seoul City Hall.  Even more books of both types are found on the store’s shelves.  Eagle-eyed readers will spot a mixture of both official and third party publications.

When trying to account for why certain tests are popular in the East Asian market, it is really important to pay attention to the amount of prep materials on the market, especially (but not only) collections of practice tests.

To some extent, here in Korea TOEFL and IELTS have avoided the headwinds they face in other markets because there is such a healthy ecosystem of prep materials available.  The PTE is doing okay here, but it isn’t challenging IELTS to the same extent that it is in India.  Likewise, while the DET has a lot of fans here, it hasn’t supplanted the TOEFL as a test for America-bound students like it has in Europe.

People here want to take tests that they can prepare for on their own.  Young people in Korea spend a lot of time studying for tests, and are pretty good at breaking them down to their component parts and mastering them bit by bit.  But that can only be done when they have access to a ton of super accurate study materials. Reputable third party publishers here are trusted to produce practice tests that are 99% similar to the real thing. That’s one reason why some people here are sticking with the legacy tests.

In markets with less of this sort of stuff, there is less reason to stick with the legacy tests.

In part this explains the high volumes (in Korea) of somewhat older English tests like the G-TELP, TOEIC and OPIc, all of which remain extremely popular in the region.  Surprisingly so.

Test makers should keep this in mind.  They should also remember that the legacy tests can count on third party publishers to crank out a steady stream of materials on their own, but upstarts might have to shoulder some of the burden themselves.

(For the record, I didn’t spot any PTE books and I’m not sure any are available from Korea publishers at all.  I didn’t spot any DET books either, though the influential “Siwon School” company does have a line on the market.)

The Chinese market deserves a post all of its own.  So… I think I’ll save my thoughts on that one for a later date.