I blogged about the Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) earlier, but I am blogging again because the security measures surrounding it are quite amazing and very much unprecedented in the world of English language testing.
PTE Academic will not do retina scans, but it will make use of some other forms of biometrics and high-tech security. Each candidate’s fingerprint, photo and signature will be digitized. Furthermore, the EL Gazette reported in its September issue that the PTE Academic would also use palm vein scanning technology. It is virtually impossible to reproduce the pattern of veins in a human hand, and therefore this record for each test-taker will catch anyone taking the test several times under different names. A voice print will also be made of the test-taker and will be made available to the institution to which is being applied, so that the two may be compared.
The test will be computer-based and will have to be taken at Pearson Vue test centers. Candidates will be enclosed in separate partitions so that they can not see any other candidates’ computer screens and they are recorded on video and watched by a room monitor. Questions will be randomized and replenished frequently and the therefore there is almost no chance that any candidates in the same test center will have exactly the same test. Furthermore, test content will be stored on Pearson’s own secure platform that delivers information automatically to test centers via an encrypted communications link. This will prevent the problem of hacking, which may have been a problem for ETS:
Legend has it that within days of the original computer-based TOEFL being launched in China, Chinese hackers had got into the site, downloaded tens of thousands of items, together with the correct answers, and put them up on the web for students to download and learn from heart. Whether or not this is true, and whether or not students who learned over ten thousand items by heart deserved to pass anyway, the problem is obvious.
-EL Gazette, September 2009
It is hard not to be impressed. And seeing as there are students who cheat or who show up on a school’s doorstep with a language proficiency level that is nowhere close to what their TOEFL score suggests, undoubtedly many universities will be happy to accept this test on the security features alone.
Though there is a fair amount of information available about the security features of this test, I haven’t been able to piece together much about the test itself and whether it does a better job than anything else on the market for assessing language ability. I have gotten the impression that it is similar to TOEFL in the sense that you may have to listen to something and then summarize it orally. It does not have a face-to-face dimension like IELTS, which is unfortunate. The TOEFL iBT seemed unrealistic and intimidating enough: listening to a brief talk on something you know little to nothing about and then quickly summarizing it orally into a microphone. PTE Academic sounds like it will be similar, but on top of it all you will also be in an enclosed, high-security environment… and you will be watched!
There is a website where you can learn more as well as a whole bunch of very-professional (and only moderately informative) videos on YouTube. A preparation guide, The Official Guide to PTE Aacademic (text with Audio CD and CD ROM) will come out in November.
Posted by Nicole
Tags: Nicole, technology, testing
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