ABOUT ETS
Educational Testing Service (ETS) is a U.S.-registered
501(c)(3) non-profit organization. In 1947, the American Council
on Education (ACE), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, and the College Entrance Examination Board
contributed their testing programs, a portion of their assets,
and key employees to found Educational Testing Service under the
leadership of Henry Chauncey. ETS was formed to take over the
testing activities of its founders (whose organizations were not
well suited to running operational assessment programs), and to
pursue research intended to advance educational measurement and
education. Among other things, ACE gave to the new organization
the Cooperative Test Service and the National Teachers
Examination; Carnegie gave the GRE; and the College Board turned
over to ETS the operation (but not ownership) of the SAT.
In creating the organization, the founders of Educational Testing
Service brought to life a concept that had been proposed a decade
earlier by James Bryant Conant, the President of Harvard
University. Conant, who introduced aptitude tests into the
undergraduate admissions system, believed that a single
organization devoted to educational assessment and research could
contribute significantly to the progress of education in the
United States.
Today ETS is the world's largest private, nonprofit educational
measurement and research organization. The mission of ETS is to
advance quality and equity in education for all people worldwide
by providing fair and valid assessments, research, and related
services. ETS helps teachers teach, students learn, and parents
measure the educational and intellectual progress of their
children.
ETS develops, administers, and scores more than 50 million tests
each year at over 9,000 locations in the U.S. and more than 180
other countries. About 25% of the work carried out by ETS is
contracted by the College Board, a private, nonprofit membership
association of universities, colleges, school districts, and
secondary schools. The most popular of the College Board's tests
is the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test; for undergraduate school
admissions), taken by more than 3 million students annually. ETS
also develops and administers the College Board's Preliminary
SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) and
the Advanced Placement program, which is widely used in U.S. high
schools for advanced course credit. Since 1983, ETS has conducted
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as
the "Nation's Report Card," under contract to the US National
Center for Education Statistics. NAEP is the only nationally
representative and continuing assessment of what US students know
and can do. ETS is currently responsible for coordination among
the nine NAEP Alliance contractors, for item development, and for
design, data analysis, and reporting. In addition to the contract
work that ETS undertakes for nonprofit and government entities
like the College Board, the National Center for Education
Statistics, and state education departments, the organization
offers its own tests. These tests include the Graduate Record
Examinations (GRE) (for graduate and professional school
admissions), the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
(for post-secondary admissions), the Test of English for
International Communication (TOEIC) (for use by business and
industry), and the Praxis Series (for teacher licensure and
certification).
The international campus-like headquarters of ETS is in Princeton
Township, New Jersey (with a Princeton, New Jersey, mailing
address); processing, shipping, customer service and test
security is in nearby Ewing, New Jersey. ETS also has a major
office in San Antonio, TX, which houses its K-12 Assessment
Programs division, and smaller offices in Philadelphia, PA,
Washington, DC, Hato Rey, PR, and Concord, Sacramento, and
Monterey, CA. Overseas office locations, all of which are
associated with for-profit subsidiaries that are wholly owned by
ETS, include Amsterdam (ETS Global BV headquarters), London (ETS
Global BV), Seoul (ETS Global BV), Paris (ETS Global BV), Amman
(ETS Global BV), Warsaw (ETS Global BV), Beijing (ETS China), and
Kingston, Ontario (ETS Canada).
To help support its nonprofit educational mission, ETS, like many
other nonprofits, conducts business activities that are unrelated
to that mission (e.g., employment testing). Under US tax law,
these activities may be conducted (within limits) by the
nonprofit itself, or by for-profit subsidiaries. Most of the
"off-mission" work conducted by ETS is carried out by such wholly
owned, for-profit subsidiaries as Prometric, which delivers tests
for hundreds of third-party clients, ETS Global BV, which
contains much of the international operations of the company, ETS
China, and ETS Canada. Prometric was acquired by ETS in 2007. It
operates a test center network composed of over 10,000 sites in
160 countries. Prometric's corporate headquarters are located in
Canton (Baltimore, Maryland) in the United States.
ETS operates on an annual budget exceeding U.S. $1
billion. The total revenues of ETS constituted around U.S. $550
million in 2000, around U.S. $800 million in 2005, U.S. $960 million in 2010,
and around $1,350 million in 2016, according to financial information
reported to the Internal Revenue Service on Form 990, which is
publicly available.
More than 3,200 employees work at ETS's offices throughout the United States and the world.
More than 2,300 of ETS's professional staff have training and expertise in education, psychology, statistics, psychometrics, computer science, sociology, and the humanities.
Of these, around 1,000 have advanced degrees, and 390 hold doctorates. In addition, 1,150 employees support ETS's wholly owned subsidiary Prometric.
ETS is governed by a 16-member Board of Trustees. The board
members represent various levels and areas of interest in
education and business. Among other things, they select the
president of ETS, oversee the leadership provided by ETS
officers, set policy, and determine future directions for the
entire organization.
By building on existing capabilities, ETS is increasing its
presence in certain education markets (K-12, occupational testing
and training, and the international arena - Europe, Asia, and
Latin America), allowing the organization to offer a broader
array of assessments, ones that focus on placement, instruction,
and adherence to standards-in addition to those that focus on
selection and licensing.
Although ETS is the world's largest testing organization, there
are competitors for most of the testing programs and related
products and services it develops.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, ETS Europe makes the
world-class products, services, and resources of ETS more readily
accessible to European educators and test takers.
ETS has recently been subject to criticism. Americans for
Educational Testing Reform (AETR) claims that ETS is violating
its non-profit status through excessive profits, executive
compensation, and governing board member pay (which the IRS
specifically advises against). AETR further claims that ETS is
acting unethically by selling test preparation materials,
directly lobbying legislators and government officials, and
refusing to acknowledge test-taker rights. It also criticises ETS
for forcing test-takers to participate in research experiments
during the actual exam.