Testing agency cracks down on cheating
Educational Testing Service has been taking action to prevent cheating on its tests, according to David Payne, vicepresident and chief operating officer of the higher education division at ETS.
ETS is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that administers international tests including GRE, TOEFL and TOEIC.
Cheating on ETS exams has been reported in many countries in recent years, with a widely known TOEIC fraud case in Britain that was disclosed by the BBC last year.
Payne said cheating on exams is not limited to a specific region or exam, but is happening every- where, since the scores determine what students are able to do in their academic career.
“At ETS, we take test security very seriously, and for all our large programs, like GRE and TOEFL, we have multiple measures in place to prevent cheating,” Payne said.
Payne said one of the ways that students tried to get better scores on the GRE was accessing questions ahead of time to study.
After ETS launched the revised GRE and strengthened its security in 2011, it became more difficult to cheat.
“We have very large pools of questions,” Payne said. “Now, if students get access to questions ahead of time, there’s no way for them to predict which questions will occur when they actually take the test.”
“So it’s really an inefficient approach to try to memorize lots of questions because you can’t predict which questions will show up on your specific test.”
Payne said they are also aware that it’s common in China for students to share questions and study in groups, and that questions posted on the Internet are available to any student from around the world who is trying to be as prepared as possible.
“We don’t expect that to change. Our responsibility is to design a test so that practice doesn’t give students some unfair advantage that would help them relative to other students,” Payne said, stressing the importance of having a large pool of items.
While he doesn’t foresee any significant changes to the GRE or TOEFL tests in the near future, Payne said ETS will continue to explore the possibility of making what he called “tweaks” to the tests, such as creating new items or question types.
But it is introducing items slowly to ensure that new question types are known and appropriate to students, he said.