The Testing Giants Come Out Swinging

With a new English-proficiency test, Pearson is taking on the established leader, the TOEFL exam from ETS, and 500 schools are embracing it

By Alison Damast

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For years, foreign students seeking to study at American universities and English-speaking programs around the world have turned to the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exam, a tool admissions officers use to evaluate an applicant's English proficiency. Now, publishing giant Pearson (PSO) is hoping to get a piece of this lucrative testing market, unveiling a new global test of English this fall called the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic). The new exam will be available to students starting Oct. 26 in selected regions, and already 780 institutions around the world have expressed an interest in the exam, including 500 that have indicated they will allow students to submit it. It will measure students' listening, reading, speaking, and writing abilities.

Mark Anderson, president of the London-based Pearson Language Tests, says he has ambitious plans for the exam, and hopes the PTE Academic will eventually become just as popular as the TOEFL and other competitors in the arena. Some noteworthy schools have already agreed to sign on, including London Business School (LBS Full-Time MBA Profile), Yale University (Yale Full-Time MBA Profile), and HEC Paris (HEC Paris Full-Time MBA Profile), he notes.

"We have clear expectations of wanting to become the leading test," he says. "I think we regard this as the gold standard test of its kind. We often talk about setting the standard, and that is what we intend to do."

Potent Threat

It's the second time this year that Pearson and the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), administrators of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) will be going head-to-head with the Educational Testing Service, administrator of the TOEFL. In recent months, ETS has been waging a campaign to get more business schools to accept the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) for admission, threatening the dominance of the GMAT as the go-to standardized exam for business school admissions. Now, Pearson is attempting to make a dent in ETS' domination of the English language testing market.

With the help of GMAC, Pearson will be making an aggressive push to get B-schools and other graduate and undergraduate programs—which primarily use the TOEFL exam—to accept the PTE Academic exam, as well. To make the case, Pearson is marketing the test as a new and improved version of the current English language exams available, promoting new features that include a brief recorded audio sample, enhanced security, and other improvements.

But getting a foothold in the market won't be easy. The TOEFL exam is accepted at 7,000 academic institutions around the world, and nearly 1 million students took the exam in 2008, according to ETS. In addition to the TOEFL, Pearson will be facing another serious competitor, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), run by a British-Australian group. That test is accepted at about 6,000 programs around the world, according to its Web site.

Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit education and international exchange organization, says that it is going to be a formidable task for Pearson to establish itself as the new leader in the English language testing market.

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