Educational Testing Service

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) was established in October 1947 to consolidate five testing offices including the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), Cooperative Test Service, and Graduate Record Office. The ETS received its charter as a nonprofit corporation in December 1947 from its New York office (Princeton University housed the main office). When the ETS was established, there was no national testing agency in the United States, although about 60 million tests were administered [Page 318]to 20 million people each year. Quickly expanding into a national institution, the ETS was created to produce and administer tests, enhance their technical features, and conduct psychometric research. However, it has never been clear whether the ETS is a testing agency, curriculum clearing house, or personnel records office. The conflation of these functions underlies fundamental questions of testing, curriculum, and class stratification: Is the ETS public spirited or does it preserve private privilege? Are the tests it produces and administers fair? Has its corporate power to standardize curriculum exceeded public mechanisms to regulate this process? The corporation's nonprofit status is also perennially thrown into question, given that its first large-scale contract (draft-deferment testing for the Selective Service System in 1951) generated a $900,000 profit, and its current annual revenue is $900 million from 24 million test takers.

The ETS's most recognizable tests were produced or acquired in its first two decades and continue to generate a base of revenue and controversy. The Graduate Record Examination (1949), National Teacher Exam (now the Praxis Series; 1949), and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL; 1961), acquired from the CEEB in the mid 1960s, are immensely popular. For example, the TOEFL is administered each year in 110 countries for 6,000 institutions to 6.2 million test takers (compare to 600,000 Praxis I and II exam takers each year). But perhaps the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), initially developed in 1926 and its derivatives, such as the SAT Achievement Tests (SAT II Subject Tests; 1934), Junior SAT (1937), and the Preliminary SAT (1959), are the most renowned and controversial. Although initially called an aptitude test, the SAT, it has been argued, has the characteristics and faults of intelligence tests. The aptitude or ability measured is simply the ability to do well in college. Measuring developed ability or educational preparedness to predict college performance, the SAT provides objectivity for making tough, meritocratic decisions on admissions and awards. It is defended on a basis that its measures are free of bias. SAT test takers increased from 80,000 in 1950 to about 800,000 in 1960, the year the University of California system began requiring the test for applicants. Annual administrations surpassed one million in 1963 and are currently at about 2.2 million. Increases in the number of students taking the SAT, or its rival, the American College Test, track college enrollments. Findings of discrimination in testing were common through the 1960s and 1970s, and the SAT raised a far-reaching question: Can scores be significantly raised by curriculum?

The commercial test prep or tutoring industry paralleled the expansion of the ETS, and standardization was coincident with testing. In 1976, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began investigating companies, such as Kaplan, that advertised increases, as much as 150 points, on the SAT (total = 1600) challenging the ETS's position that tutoring made little difference. The FTC's 1978 report affirmed tutoring claims, unifying activists for truth-in-testing legislation and access to curriculum. California enacted legislation in September 1978 and New York in January 1980 to require disclosure of test items used in determining individual scores. Also in 1980, Ralph Nader released The Reign of the ETS, a scathing 554-page report—a last straw forcing the corporation to reconcile its public profile with its power and monopoly. The tutoring and standardized curriculum market boomed; Sylvan Learning Systems was founded in 1979, and The Princeton Review in 1981. In 1993, Sylvan won an exclusive provider contract to administer the ETS's electronic tests in centers across the United States while landing contracts with city school districts to standardize curriculum for the SAT II and other tests throughout the 1990s. ETS is now a multinational corporation including the ETS Global Division and ETS Global BV subsidiary.

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