“… when I started on this project, I had never taken the TOEFL iBT before. And I said you know what, before I begin on thinking about the TOEFL, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to take the assessment. And by the time I got through the registration, I was exhausted. It had taken me sort of almost a half hour. Then I said okay let’s do some user testing. What’s really going on with these test takers. We found that the average time it takes to register for the TOEFL is about 31 minutes and so that was one of the biggest things we wanted to tackle…”
“… however advances in technology and advances in how we know individuals are assessed most effectively have enabled the phenomenal psychometricians and scientists of ETS to develop analyzes that they could conduct after the assessment to ensure the same of reliability and validity, so what that enabled us to do was to remove the unscored section and conduct those statistics following the assessment…”
“… We’ve been really fortunate in the past year to welcome a new CEO and president Amit Sivak and one of the things that I really appreciate about Amit is that he is very very committed to the test takers that we serve. And he aligns on sort of this user obsession that we embody and so one of his initial asks was let’s talk to some test takers. Let’s talk to some score users across all of our products and understand if we’re meeting their needs and if we can better meet their needs. We realize that individuals have choice and we serve the test takers. We appreciate when they choose ETS, so we want to make sure that we’re delivering the best services that we can… ”
“… ETS has for a long time served a really important need where we provided opportunity through assessment. Those assessments have been what we might call summative assessments, so assessments that provide a score but do not necessarily provide feedback on how to improve on the performance on that assessment. Where we want to move is toward a direction where we can support learners and test takers on their journey throughout education… ”
除了技术进步以及商业运营外,ETS通过此次产品升级向外界传达了其战略规划转向的信号。具体来讲,ETS希望将自己的战略发展从过去的的评估型组织(assessment organization)定位,上升到评估与学习型组织(assessment and learning organization)位置。