ETS Europe is the

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

an arm of

Educational Testing Service Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a P ...

, an American company, involved in scholastic assessment in Europe.

History

It is headquartered in

Utrecht Utrecht ( ; ; ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city of the Netherlands, as well as the capital and the most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht. The ...

in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. ETS employs about 2,700 individuals, including 240 with

doctorate A doctorate (from Latin ''doctor'', meaning "teacher") or doctoral degree is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism '' licentia docendi'' ("licence to teach ...

s and an additional 350 others with "higher degrees." Work that ETS does that is not associated with its nonprofit educational research mission is conducted by for-profit subsidiaries, such as

Prometric Prometric, also known as Prometric Testing, is an American test administration company. The corporate headquarters are located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The company manages a network of test centers, with thousands of sites in 160 ...

, which administers test by computer for licensing and certification in the professional world, and ''ETS Global BV'', which contains much of the international operations of the company.

Activities

About 25% of the work carried out by ETS is contracted by the private,

not-for-profit A not-for-profit or non-for-profit organization (NFPO) is a Legal Entity, legal entity that does not distribute surplus funds to its members and is formed to fulfill specific objectives. While not-for-profit organizations and Nonprofit organ ...

firm, the

College Board The College Board, styled as CollegeBoard, is an American not-for-profit organization that was formed in December 1899 as the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) to expand access to higher education. While the College Board is not an asso ...

. The most popular of the College Board's tests is the

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and Test score, scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test ...

, taken by more than 3 million students annually. ETS also develops and administers The College Board's

Advanced Placement Advanced Placement (AP) is a program in the United States and Canada created by the College Board. AP offers undergraduate university-level curricula and examinations to high school students. Colleges and universities in the US and elsewhere ...

program, which is widely used in US high schools for advanced course credit.

Criticism

In England and

Wales Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...

ETS Europe were contracted to operate the National Curriculum (England, Wales and Northern Ireland), National Curriculum assessments on behalf of the government. ETS took over this role from Edexcel in 2008. The first year of their 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 has criticised the awarding of the contracts to ETS, and produced a dossier listing previous problems with ETS' service. Their contract with the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, QCA was terminated in August 2008: ETS is to pay back £19.5m and cancel invoices worth £4.6m.

Inquiry

The UK government asked Lord Sutherland to conduct an inquiry into the failure of the 2008 tests. The report included in its main findings: * Primary responsibility for this summer's delivery failure rests with ETS Global BV, which won the public contract to deliver the tests * ETS's capacity to deliver the contract proved to be insufficient. A lack of comprehensive planning and testing by ETS of its systems and processes was a key factor in the delivery failure.

References

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External links