Who owns educational testing service

In , another Harvard administrator, Henry Chauncey, took an month leave of absence from his job to run the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, which was used to identify officer candidates. In its prewar incarnation, The College Board had had a relatively simple and straightforward mission, but its activities had been transformed and greatly expanded during the war years.

Instead of simply testing candidates for admission to select colleges, the organization had taken on such functions as making up exams for the State Department and the military. This broadening of functions continued in the wake of the war, when the charitable Carnegie Foundation worked to transfer control of the GRE, which had started as an experiment but had grown to dwarf the rest of the Foundation, to The College Board.

At the time of this proposal, The College Board was made up of 52 select member institutions. Absorbing the GRE necessitated a substantial restructuring of the organization and again raised the issue of a consolidation of test-giving organizations.

A committee was formed to examine various proposals, and it began meeting in the fall of In October, this body recommended the creation of one central test-giving organization. By the end of , the process of working out the actual details of a merger had begun in earnest among the three founding organizations of the tentatively-named Educational Testing Service. By June , difficulties such as the composition of a Board of Trustees had been resolved, and ETS was set up for a trial five-year period.

Each of the member groups turned over its testing operations and a portion of its assets. Gradually, files, office equipment, and employees from the founding organizations of ETS arrived, until the organization had employees.

At the time, ETS elaborated a three-fold goal: to develop and administer tests, to conduct research, and to advise educational institutions.

Atomic Energy Commission, the U. State Department, and the Pepsi-Cola Corporation. The organization distributed a wide variety of tests for various assessment purposes. As the ranks of students at American colleges were swelled by soldiers returning from war and enrolling under the G. In , college admissions exams were taken by 75, students. By , ETS had begun to more fully understand and assess its role in society. In that year, Chauncey proposed in his annual report for ETS that a national census of abilities and talents be undertaken in order to assist the military and to strengthen educational and industrial planning.

By , ETS had already started to outgrow the building it had purchased on Nassau Street in Princeton, and Chauncey selected a new site for the organization, a acre estate on Rosedale Road in Princeton that had formerly served as a working farm as well as the Stony Brook Hunt Club. Throughout the decade, the activities and number of tests administered by ETS continued to grow. In , ETS began to release students' scores on the SAT to their high schools, so that they could in turn be passed on to the students.

By the beginning of the s, nearly 25 percent of all American high school students were taking the SAT. By , 15 years after its inception, ETS had become not just a testing organization but a more broadly based educational entity.

In addition to expansion in the number of people taking ETS tests, the number of tests available also grew during the s. The organization developed assessments to measure the abilities of people from secondary school right on through their professional career. Along with this growth in the number of tests given, the size and role of ETS expanded as well.

During this time, ETS had also constructed a residence for its president on the Rosedale campus. This construction was made possible by the steady surge in growth ETS had experienced in the postwar years, as the organization's sales doubled every five years between and the early s.

By the mids, ETS had become, in effect, the nation's leading testing organization. In , the institution was cited as a hot growth company in American business by Forbes magazine. The revenues generated by ETS's activities continued to expand throughout the late s. The company suffered its first serious threat at the end of that decade, when, in response to growing criticism of its monopolistic power, New York state passed the Educational Testing Act, a disclosure law that required ETS to release certain test questions and graded answer sheets to students.

In the following year, , ETS suffered its first fiscal deficit. In response, the company reduced its staff and commissioned a strategic plan from a management consulting firm in Following the enactment of the truth in testing law, ETS suffered further criticism in the early s, as outsiders asserted that its tests were culturally biased to favor white members of the upper middle class and that they were poor predictors of actual performance.

ETS also took steps to protect its copyrighted materials from violation by entrepreneurs who offered courses to raise student's scores on its exams. In , students who had prepared for achievement tests by taking a Princeton Review course reported that they had already seen some of the questions on the test.

This violation of test security, along with others, caused ETS to remove several questions from active use on its exams. In response to concerns over the format and scope of standardized tests, The College Board undertook a revision of the exams in The new SAT-I, which measured verbal and mathematical skills, included longer reading passages and more questions to determine how well students had understood them.

In the math sections, students were required to work out some answers entirely on their own, with the use of a pocket calculator, rather than simply choosing from answers supplied to them. These changes, made at the direction of a committee headed by the president of Harvard, were designed to put a greater emphasis on problem solving.

Despite its somewhat embattled place in the culture of American education, ETS continued to thrive materially throughout the late s. By , it had solidified its place as by far the largest American private educational assessment service. Despite this impressive size, ETS sought, as it moved into the s, to expand its activities even further. Among the programs ETS began to offer at this time were educational tools making use of new technology. The company began to develop grammar school courses that used computers and interactive videos to foster critical-thinking skills.

This test was used in about two-thirds of the states to license teachers. The company's roster of exams had ballooned to cover a wide variety of fields, from manicurists to shopping center managers.

In addition, ETS had successfully expanded its geographic scope, offering tests in foreign countries. By , the company was administering nine million tests each year. ETS continued to use new technology to update its tests throughout the early s. In November , the company introduced a computerized version of the GRE, which was slated to eventually replace the old paper-and-pencil version of the test.

Rather than simply consisting of the old test on computer, the new exam was to be more adaptive, adjusting its level of difficulty to suit the aptitude of the student taking the test.

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.