Authorities in Japan recently busted a 27-year-old university student for allegedly cheating on the TOEIC (story here and here).  The Japanese police, acting on a tip, sent undercover agents to a local testing center and nabbed the suspected cheater. Apparently he was planning to use a microphone to communicate answers to others in the room. As he was being dragged away by the cops, 30% of the test takers in the center decided to just go home. 

A few thoughts come to mind:

1. Obviously, test-center administrations are not automatically better than at-home administrations (or vice versa).  Both approaches have potential weaknesses.
2. When a particular test center is deemed to have poor security, unscrupulous test takers will flood into that test center to take advantage of it.  Some of these test takers will be domestic, and others will be from abroad.  Frequent audits are necessary to ensure that test centers maintain rigorous standards.  Mystery test-takers should be utilized as well.
3. Test makers care a lot about security at test centers.  However, not all test-centers are self-operated.  Test makers depend on their partners to uphold their standards.  Frequent audits are necessary to ensure that they do so.
4. Paper tests create extra challenges since many people (sometimes everyone) in the room have the same test form.  Computer-based delivery can eliminate this concern.
5. Recent moves by the IELTS partnership to limit use of the paper-based IELTS may be due to some of the aforementioned points, but I suppose they’ll never say.

The TOEIC “Report on Test Takers Worldwide” for 2024 is now available.  The report is based on responses to a questionnaire given to a total of 3,229,884 people.  I think that represents the entire test taking population.  The figure is just about identical to 2023 and 2022.  It was about 4.8 million in 2019.

Note that ETS overwrites the old PDFs each year a new one gets uploaded.  If you want to see old stats, you can start looking for them at the Wayback Machine.

I stayed up real late to watch a webinar about the new TOEIC Link Test.  I learned a few things that are worth passing along:

1. The full 4-skills version of the test takes about 81 minutes to complete.  Compare that to the 200 minutes it takes to complete the 4-skill version of the regular TOEIC.
2. The test is currently available in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.  It will be available in other countries at some other time.
3. Registration must be completed via an EPN.  It is not done directly with ETS.
4. I’m not a TOEIC expert, but it looks like the TOEIC link has the same reading and listening item types as the regular TOEIC.  But the speaking and writing tasks are quite different.
5. It appears that scoring is done mostly by AI, but with “human review.”  Scores are available in 48 hours.
6. This is an at-home product.  Proctoring can be either wholly AI or AI+human.  I guess it depends on the EPN.  Or something.
7. The reading and listening sections are adaptive – after a routing module, test takers will get sent to a “hard” module or an “easy” module.

ETS sees the world of higher-ed as a potential source of clients for this test.

ETS has just launched a new product called “TOEIC Link.”  Details are still a bit vague, but it looks like an at-home implementation of the TOEIC test.  You can read the press release here, but note that the actual product website is not available in certain countries.

A few early details are worth mentioning:

1. Each section of the test is scored between 0 and 25 points, which is different from the normal TOEIC.  The scores are aligned with the CEFR.
2. Test takers can choose which sections (reading, writing, listening, speaking) are included in their administration.
3. It isn’t clear if there is any difference in content between the TOEIC and the TOEIC Link.  The internet rumor mill suggests that it might have new item types, but I’m not certain of that.
4. It appears that registration is handled by local partners (EPNs), like the standard TOEIC.
5. There are two proctoring options – AI with a human proctor, and AI without a human.
6. Research is forthcoming.

The TOEIC doesn’t get as much coverage as the higher stakes exams, but it is extremely popular in certain key markets (Japan, Korea, Taiwan and France are the big ones).  In 2023, the TOEIC reading/listening test was taken more than 3.2 million times worldwide.  That’s pretty close to the number of people who took the IELTS that year (and way more than the number who took the PTE, TOEFL and DET tests).  In 2019 the TOEIC reading/listening test was taken more than 4.8 million times, making it (by far) the most popular commercial English test in the world at that time.

The content of the TOEIC focuses largely on business-related situations.  This means test takers might answer questions about an email sent by someone supplying products to a company or about some kind of invoice or receipt. Or a chain of text messages. Or a pamphlet advertising some services. You get the point.  It also includes some grammar and usage questions, like on the classic TOEFL.  I’ll paste images of some sample questions below.

This test has always had a unique business model. Test takers register via a local EPN (ETS Preferred Network) partner which handles just about everything – registration, payment, score reports, proctoring, etc.  In Korea, for instance, that partner is YBM.  ETS, meanwhile, generates and scores test items and is paid a royalty for each administration of the test.

TOEIC prep is a huge business here in Korea – the bookstores I visit contain more TOEIC books than IELTS and TOEFL books combined.  I’ve been told that Japanese bookstores are similar.

My final office job was a year in a cubical writing practice TOEIC questions for Hackers Education Group in Seoul. Most of the material I generated was sold on to private institutes in Japan, but some of it still pops up in Korean textbooks.  If you’re studying for the test and spot an invoice signed by a Nova Scotia radio host or a character from Degrassi, you’re probably reading one of my items.

A fellow in Korea was sentenced to three years in jail for helping people cheat on the TOEIC. His scheme involved taking pictures of his answers during the break following the listening section and sending them out to his clients from a bathroom stall. It is more involved than that, but it involves a very real likelihood of many people cramming themselves into a single bathroom stall and I don’t want to write about it in detail.

Regular readers know that the TOEIC is big business in Korea and Japan (and a few European markets). Indeed, the TOEIC may be the most widely taken standardized English test in the world. I once had a job in Korea where I sat at a desk in Gangnam and wrote TOEIC practice questions for eight hours a day. Every day. For almost a year.

It is worth mentioning that test centers are not quite as secure as they ought to be. When Duolingo or Pearson or someone else convinces governments to accept their at-home tests for immigration purposes, the pitch will be (in part) that their approach is actually MORE secure that traditional test center testing. They will probably be correct in that assertion.

The 2023 “Report on Test Takers Worldwide” for TOEIC is now available. Interesting reading, if you are into that sort of thing.  It includes score data from around the world, but note that most of the test-takers are in Japan and Korea.  Probably more than 80%.

A total of 3.2 million test takers answered the survey. That’s almost unchanged since last year.

In the final pre-pandemic year, about 4.8 million test takers answered the survey.

Over at The Guardian, Amelia Gentleman continues her excellent reporting on the TOEIC cheating scandal in an interview with London MP Stephen Timms. Of the evidence of cheating provided by ETS to the Home Office, he says:

“Surely somebody in the Home Office seeing that should have said: ‘Hang on that can’t be right, that over 97% are cheats.’ So you have to conclude there must be people in the department who just think: ‘Well, they’re foreign, therefore they cheat.’ And I think that’s part of what went wrong here.”

He also notes:

“These are young people who entrusted their future to Britain and, in reality, Britain has proved utterly untrustworthy and has wrecked their lives. All of them have had the start of their careers blighted for years. And many of them will never ever fully recover from what happened, some have permanent mental health problems. We treated them appallingly.”

This is English testing gone awry, folks.

I wrote about the TOEIC test in passing and mentioned that it is possibly the most popular English test in the world.  Someone asked exactly how popular it is.  ETS doesn’t list that number, but in 2022 about 3.2 million TOEIC test-takers completed ETS’s Background Questionnaire for the TOEIC reading and listening test. I don’t know if that number includes repeaters, but we can assume the test was taken at least that many times.  Note that that does not include people who took the separate speaking and writing TOEIC test, which I don’t have figures for.

You can compare that figure to the rest ‘o the tests:

1. About 1.9 IELTS administrations through IDP for the year ending June 2023.
2. About 1.6 million IELTS administrations through British Council for the year ending March 2022 (a figure that will be much lower in 2023 given that BC has pulled out of India).
3. About a million TOEFL administrations circa 2022 (according to Amit Sevak, speaking on PIE Live).
4. About 700,000 Duolingo administrations for the year ending Q2 2023 (my guess based on the company’s financial reports).
5. About 827,000 PTE administrations in 2022 (2023 will be much larger).

What makes the TOEIC volume particularly impressive is that it is mostly taken in Korea and Japan.  Indeed, the TOEIC was specifically created for the Japanese market back in the 1970s.

For fun, I’ve included some snapshots from my local bookstore’s English test section.  You can see that the TOEIC section is twice as big as the TOEFL section.  I’ve also included a snapshot of the IELTS section, which is somewhat small.  Not pictured are the OPIc and TEPS sections which are about as large as the IELTS section.  I’m in a somewhat working class (and old) section of Seoul, so don’t take this as an indication of what the most popular bookstores offer.

Also: on my way into the bookstore I spotted a woman on the escalator reading a copy of a TOEFL speaking book. No kidding.

Great news, everyone. Today I got this whole box of official TOEIC chocolates. Each individually wrapped chocolate comes with some vocabulary from the world of business.

They are sold by YBM, which is the official vendor of TOEIC Tests in Korea. They are available at convenience stores across the country.

I’ll have you know that this is not a sponsored post. I paid for this very large box of chocolates with my own money.

The PIE News has checked in with an update on the English Testing Scandal of 2014.  It describes the utter ruination of Sabtain Umer’s life after he (along with thousands of others) was accused of cheating on the TOEIC test.

The accusations (read more) were based on evidence produced by ETS that was later described as “confused, misleading, incomplete and unsafe” by an all-party parliamentary group created to investigate the scandal.

The chair of that group wrote in the foreword to its report:

“One thing that struck me throughout our hearings was that evidence from ETS – the basis for denying visas to thousands of overseas students, often with catastrophic effects – quite simply could not be relied upon.”

The director of Migrant Voice called the ETS evidence “dodgy” in an earlier report by the PIE News.

Regardless, as I wrote here three months ago:

“97% of all TOEIC administrations in the UK from 2011 to 2014 were deemed suspicious or fraudulent. In the wake of that determination, test-takers were arrested and dragged off to detention centers. Mass deportations followed that. Affected individuals have spent the past decade trying to recover from both the tangible impacts on their lives and the emotional trauma. I’m not exaggerating.”

A few people have fought back and won, but most of the affected test takers have simply suffered in silence.

A decade has passed and though ETS was removed from the list of approved test providers by the Secretary of State, I’m not sure anyone from ETS has taken responsibility for their errors (I know you’re reading this, so correct me if I’m wrong, please).

Situations like Mr. Umer’s are why I continue to write about complaints that current TOEFL test takers have about score cancellations that come without the presentation of evidence and without an opportunity to mount an appeal.  Just a few weeks ago I wrote here about the apparent mass cancellation of scores in Iran and the plans and lives that were thrown into disaray in its wake.

There is an opportunity for those employed at ETS post-2014 to reach out to their longer tenured colleagues (if any remain) to discuss what they learned from this situation and how those learnings can further the organization’s mission to promote and increase equity in education.

I’ll write my own ideas in this space at a later date.  Stay tuned.

If this story is new to you, check out this report from BBC.