Educational assessment firm ETS to maintain focus on GRE, TOEFL in India

ETS is making significant investments in TOEFL in India, said the company’s President and CEO Amit Sevak, adding that he hopes that TOEFL will become the leading provider test in India for English language admission globally.

ETS, which is the largest private educational assessment organisation in the world, owns TOEFL and GRE General Test among others. The company plans to focus on both these tests in India given the large number of Indian students going abroad for higher studies.  

The company has also made significant investments relating to TOEFL in the last 12 months, Sevak told BT. “We now have recognition for TOEFL for Canada. This allows an Indian student to use TOEFL to get into Canada. We've made investments to shorten the test from over three hours to less than two hours, but still maintain the academic quality of the original test,” he said.

TOEFL or the Test of English as a Foreign Language is a standardised English test largely taken by students who plan to study in universities in the US.

ETS has recently also launched TOEFL TestReady recently, which is an AI enabled personalised test preparation for TOEFL in India, and a large number of people have already registered for it in India to prepare for the test.

“We’re doing a lot of other things around TOEFL, we're building a whole ecosystem of products and services around TOEFL. And so TOEFL is going to continue to be the focus for us, we are absolutely committed to offering TOEFL in India. We're going to have more tie ups around TOEFL in India, tie ups with companies, tie ups with various partners, tie ups with financing organisations,” he said,

Sevak also highlighted that India has recently surpassed the US as the country with the largest number of test takers of the GRE or Graduate Record Examination.

“It’s a very interesting data point. GRE was associated in the US with graduate admissions for decades been...Now, India has more test takers of theory than even the US. So it just shows number one that India is rising, but it also shows the global significance of GRE,” he said in a recent interview to BT.

According to data with ETS, the countries with the greatest numbers of citizens who took the GRE in the 2022-23 testing year (June-July) were India (113,304), the US (97, 676), and China (57,769). For the GRE test takers in India in the 2022-23 testing year, the most popular intended graduate majors were Physical Sciences (35%), Undecided (29%) and Engineering (13%).

Sevak noted that GRE has two levels of importance in India. “The first is that almost 100 programmes of universities in India now accept GRE for admission within India,” he said. With its long association with GRE, ETS also has a lot of data around the test and has the ability to help the Indian government and other governments understand where people want to study and why they want to study,” he highlighted noting that India now wants to have more international students studying in India.

“With this focus on getting more attracting more international students here, it's important that the universities here in India continue to accept the GRE, because it allows those students that are in other countries who have taken the GRE to go to a university in Canada, potentially or UK and US, if they take that one test, they can also get into graduate school here. So we think that the GRE is going to continue to be important in India,” he highlighted.