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America¡¯s Educational Testing Service (ETS) says it will conduct a special TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam solely for applicants in Korea on June 3. The announcement comes a week after ETS halted test applications without any prior notice, causing a tremendous amount of confusion and difficulties for test applicants in Korea. ETS says 8,000 people can apply for the special test. It may appear as if the measure is helping Korean applicants. But in reality, it¡¯s having the opposite effect.
The special test will be a paper exam, rather than an Internet-based one. Applicants are surprised, since the test questions are focused on English grammar rather than writing and speaking. Moreover, hardly any organization, both inside and outside of Korea, is willing to accept the results of this special test as a basis for determining English language proficiency. Applicants in Korea, who were waiting for a belated measure from ETS, are now angry, saying that the organization is ¡°mocking¡± Koreans.
At the same time, without notifying when and how on-line applications will resume, ETS has been accepting applications suddenly over the past two to three days. Applicants have grown weary of sitting in front of their computers all day long, afraid of missing one of those unannounced application opportunities. But ETS has yet to issue a formal apology and has not said a word about what it plans to do.
ETS, based in Princeton, New Jersey, is a non-profit organization, and more closely resembles a public institution. It exclusively handles not only TOEFL and TOEIC (Test of English as an International Language) exams, but also 200 other U.S. government exams, including those for the CIA and FBI. ETS has 9,000 test centers around the world and can be called the face of America when it comes to English.
Such an organization has been neglecting for the past seven months what has blown up into a chaotic situation in Korea, which is the result of ETS offering fewer TOEFL tests and allowing fewer people to take them at a time. The stance of ETS has been ¡°take it or leave it¡± and the organization made W19.5 billion (US$1=W929) from application fees in Korea last year alone. Korea accounts for 20 percent of global TOEFL demand and there are 25 test centers here. Yet ETS is ignoring calls from Korean applicants for improvements in services by opening a branch in Korea. It appears that ETS, which has been both unreasonable and negligent toward Korean applicants, has no intention of changing its pride and prejudice toward Koreans.
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