Assessments are growing smarter and more personalised as their use booms across education and the workplace, but ensuring results remain trusted is becoming ever more challenging, according to the head of the world’s largest testing firm.
Amit Sevak, chief executive of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), has recently revealed major changes to two of its most used assessments – the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and GRE, used in graduate school admissions – amid widespread questioning of the value of standardised testing and threats to academic integrity from all sides.
After shortening the tests and streamlining the number of tasks to make them more convenient to take, Mr Sevak said his longer-term vision was to move testing away from summative scores to providing universities with a data breakdown of the various skills of the applicant.
“A score on a test is often just a number,” he said. “In the future these will be much more detailed and specific to a person’s areas of strength and include recommendations where skills could be improved.”
