Here the link to the story in The Times of London: ETS loses contract after failure to deliver SATs test results on time (published August 15).
Here is some background on the significance of this development from FairTest‘s Bob Shaeffer:
This story has global implications because the Educational Testing
Service is a major player in the U.S. college admissions, K-12
assessment and teacher licensing markets as well as plans for aggressive
international expansion. Based on FairTest’s more than twenty years of
experience, ETS screw-ups in the U.K. are not unusual. For example:– ETS had to pay prospective teachers more than $11 million U.S. to
settle a lawsuit about systematic mistakes in scoring its PRAXIS
licensing exams which gave false failing scores to more than than 4,000
educators. Here’s a link to a summary of that issue:http://www.fairtest.org/ets-pays-11-1-million-settle-teacher-test-lawsuit
– Also, ETS recently lost the contract to deliver the Graduate
Management Admissions Test (GMAT) due to repeated administrative and
scoring mistakes .http://www.fairtest.org/ets-loses-gmat-contract
– ETS has also encountered significant difficulties in launching new
international versions of the Test of English as a Foreign Language
(TOEFL) and Graduate Record Exam (GRE)http://www.fairtest.org/new-gre-cancellation-reveals-ets-flaws
A cross-cutting pattern is that ETS submits low bids to win new testing
contracts but then lacks the technical competence and qualified staff to
deliver on its promises The same behavior appears to be typical for
other major testing companies, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill, etc., all
of which have also had major scoring problems.
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