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 Schwartz Abraham
