EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE

Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. Its products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and performance, and support education and professional development worldwide. Founded in 1947 as an independent organization by the American Council on Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the College Entrance Examination Board, ETS has grown to become the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization, annually administering more than 11 million tests in 181 countries. Helping ETS carry out its mission are the following key divisions.

The ETS Statistics and Research Division is a group of innovative, internationally respected measurement experts who specialize in research and development in psychometrics, equitable testing, and assessment technology. More than 250 division staff, including some of the nation's most distinguished scientists in the fields of psychometrics and statistics, engage in research and analysis to support existing assessments and generate ideas for future assessment products and services. At the same time, they contribute to the field of educational measurement and policy research more broadly, providing objective data to inform current discussions about policy affecting the national education debates.

The School and College Services Division manages testing and nontesting programs, develops tests and ancillary services, prepares a number of publications, and offers a variety of products and services to the education market.

The division carries out work for a number of clients as well as for ETS. It serves ETS's largest client, The College Board, by providing the development and delivery of programs such as the SAT, the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), and Advanced Placement tests (AP).

The School and College Services Division also serves the National Center for Education Statistics through the development and delivery of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Its other clients are the Educational Records Bureau (ERB), the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), Johns Hopkins University Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth (IAAY), the New York City Board of Education, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), the University of California, and the California State University System.

The mission of the Graduate and Professional Education Division is to provide leadership and continuous improvement in fair and equitable assessments and services that serve students, institutions, and society in graduate and professional education. It offers the majority of its testing through computers, and its major programs are the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

The division also houses the Fairness, Access, Multiculturalism, and Equity (FAME) Initiative, a research-based effort to help ETS address the concerns of its increasingly diverse graduate and professional school education constituencies. FAME is an ethics-based effort designed to examine the connections between the expressed values underlying the company's assessments, products, and services and actual outcomes.

The purpose of the Information Systems and Technology Division is to deliver business value through information technology. Business value is defined as increasing revenue, decreasing costs, improving productivity, and supporting strategic initiatives and directives. Within Information Systems and Technology is the Advanced Assessment and Delivery Technologies (AADT) Division that is responsible for all enterprisewide systems associated with test creation, scoring, analysis, and delivery of assessments, collecting the candidate results. This includes paper-and-pencil tests as well as computerbased tests.

The Teaching and Learning Division is committed to supporting learning and advancing good teaching through a coherent approach to the licensing, advanced certification, and professional development of teachers and school leaders. Its major assessment programs include the Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers, the School Leadership Series, and working as the primary contractor to provide certification for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The division also is responsible for the Pathwise Series that offers a variety of professional development programs tied to research-based standards to help teachers at all levels (student, beginning, and experienced teachers) improve their teaching practices.

The Communications and Public Affairs Division has the responsibility to meet the communication and information needs of ETS employees and key external constituents to support the company's strategic direction. It aids management to project the public voice of ETS, articulating the philosophy, policy, and position of the organization as a leader in education reform.

See also: Testing, subentries on Impact of Test Preparation Programs, Standardized Tests and High-Stakes Assessment.

internet resource

Educational Testing Service. 2002. <www.ets.org>.

Kurt Landgraf

EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE

EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a nonprofit testing and measurement organization founded in 1947 and headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. ETS administers more than 12 million tests annually, including the SAT (formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test), Graduate Record Exam (GRE), Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT), Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), and Praxis Series (Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers) examinations. These tests are used to help evaluate candidates for admission to under-graduate-and graduate-level institutions of higher learning. The organization is expressly dedicated to helping advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related services. ETS conceived and developed standardized testing as a tool for measuring aptitude and merit in an objective and fair way that would counter the self-perpetuating elite favoritism characteristic of American higher education into the 1960s. Toward the end of the twentieth century, these same tests became the object of some skepticism and charges of racial and gender bias.

ETS was founded to serve three organizations: the American Council on Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the College Entrance Examination Board, all of which needed skilled staff to assist in their test development and operational processing initiatives. Once established, the Educational Testing Service became the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization and a leader in educational research that generates annual revenue of more than $600 million.

Standardized testing requires three sound practices: development, measurement, and administration. Test questions or items are prepared according to a specified methodology that ensures accuracy, fairness, and the meeting of exact specifications and standards. Test measurement is accomplished through the application of statistical models. ETS's distinguished research staff has long been on the forefront of psychometric (pertaining to the measure of intelligence) theories and practices used to measure skills, knowledge, and performance. Once a test is developed, it must be administered in a secure testing environment and scored according to precise, detailed procedures, ensuring the accuracy and validity of the results.

The largest client for whom ETS does work is the College Board, a national, nonprofit membership association of more than forty-two hundred schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations whose primary mission is to assist students in their preparation for admission to colleges and universities. ETS's mandate to provide standardized tests to support educational goals including equity and fairness extends beyond college admissions: it operates as an agent for an assortment of principals. Some are external boards: GRE is sponsored by a board of seventeen members and is affiliated with the Association of Graduate Schools and the Council of Graduate Schools. TOEFL has a fifteen-member board whose expertise and affiliations include the College Board, the GRE Board, undergraduate and graduate schools, and specialists in English as a foreign or second language. Others, like the College Board, are external organizations with independent administrative offices. These include the Graduate Management Admission Council and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

ETS's work flourished most successfully in the years during which "merit" and "objectivity" were considered relatively unproblematic concepts. Beginning in the 1980s, concern for diversity and multiculturalism produced a more sophisticated but less secure sense of aptitude and achievement as well as their measurement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cameron, Robert G. The Common Yardstick: A Case for the SAT. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1989.

Lemann, Nicholas. The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Sandra SchwartzAbraham

See alsoEducation, Higher: Colleges and Universities ; Intelligence Tests ; SAT .