Current Status
ETS' international headquarters is located on an 376-acre (1.52 km2) campus outside of Princeton, New Jersey in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey; processing, shipping, customer service and test security is in nearby Ewing. 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). Not including its for-profit subsidiaries, ETS employs about 2,700 individuals, including 240 with doctorates and an additional 350 others with "higher degrees."
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.
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, 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 US 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).
In England and Wales ETS Europe, a unit of the ETS Global for-profit subsidiary, was contracted to mark and process the National Curriculum assessments on behalf of the government. ETS Global took over this role in 2008 from Edexcel, a subsidiary of Pearson, which had encountered significant and repeated problems in carrying out the marking and processing contract. As was the case for Edexcel, The first year of ETS Global's operation was struck by a number of problems, including the late arrival of scripts to examiners, a database of student entries being unavailable, and countrywide reports of problems with the marking of the papers. The opposition Conservative party criticized the awarding of the contracts to ETS, and produced a dossier listing previous problems with ETS's service. The ETS contract with the QCA was terminated in August 2008, with an agreement to pay back £19.5m and cancel invoices worth £4.6m. Subsequently, the contract for National Curriculum assessment marking and processing was again awarded to Edexcel. Like the two prior contracts, the Edexcel contract has encountered significant quality problems and the tests themselves, the focus of longstanding controversy in the English education community and among the public, have been subjected to a massive boycott by schools.
In 2009, ETS released the My Credentials Vault Service with Interfolio, Inc to "simplify the entire letter of recommendation process".
Read more about this topic: Educational Testing Service
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