The Test of English as a Foreign Language, long considered the standard language assessment tool for international applicants to Brown, now has company.
Starting with the 2005-06 admissions cycle, the International English Language Testing System has been accepted alongside TOEFL for international applicants to the College.
While the Office of Admission has always been flexible when it comes to considering different tests, the decision to officially accept IELTS was made last year after discussion within the office and a subsequent presentation by then-Dean of the College Paul Armstrong, according to Panetha Ott, director of international admission.
"For us it's a question of access," Ott said. "If students in a certain part of the world take IELTS, then we want to make it possible for them to apply to Brown without the expense of another examination."
"We're not making a statement about which test is better," Ott added. "It will probably not change the applicant pool a lot, but might give a few (more) students" a chance to apply to Brown.
While the admissions office tends to adhere to minimum cut-off scores for each test, Ott emphasized that assessing an applicant involves more than test scores.
"Consideration is a contextual one," Ott said. "Students haven't always been prepped in the same way, and we take that into account as we read an application."
The admissions office would consider an international applicant's rate of progress, even if the applicant had only limited English instruction, Ott said. There are other tools that can help the admissions office assess English proficiency as well, such as the writing section of the SAT, references or the testimony of a teacher, she said.
TOEFL is provided by the Education Testing Service, while IELTS is the product of a joint partnership of the University of Cambridge, an Australian educational service and a British organization.
TOEFL has been offered since 1964, according to the ETS.
IELTS was developed out of applied linguistic theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the test was created in 1989 as an evaluation that would be "more current with linguistic theory," said Beryl Meiron, the executive director of the U.S. branch of IELTS International.
IELTS "encourages, reflects and tests English as it is used in work, study and life," according to the IELTS Web site. The test probes "language in use," said Barbara Gourlay, Brown's coordinator of English for international teaching assistants.
TOEFL and IELTS are similar in that each assesses reading, writing, speaking and listening. "Both are fine measures of English proficiency," wrote Robert Watkins, assistant director of admissions for graduate and international admissions at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the TOEFL board, in an e-mail to The Herald.
But a major difference between the two tests is that IELTS includes a live interview as part of its spoken English assessment. Older versions of TOEFL did not have a speaking portion. Now, TOEFL has added a speaking section that the applicant completes through a microphone recording during the test.
The interactive component of IELTS is a "big plus," Gourlay said, explaining that a major part of language use is interpersonal conversation.
Gourlay said a face-to-face interview is more likely to bring out a candidate's abilities beyond technical English proficiency. Some students have "the resources to talk around something even if you don't know the vocabulary word, rather than being frozen into silence."
But there may be drawbacks to the interactive component of IELTS. Some students who took TOEFL said a spoken interview would not necessarily have been beneficial during a stressful examination. "I think it would make me more nervous than anything else," said Laura Jeanbart '07, a student from Switzerland who took TOEFL. "I think being in front of a person could be intimidating."
Because an IELTS interviewer is likely a native of the country where the test is being administered, "there is some concern that the grading of that speaking portion of the test might include unintended bias on the part of the interviewer in favor of the test-taker," Watkins wrote.
Phong Tran, a second-year graduate student in physics from Vietnam, said he thinks the interactive speaking component of IELTS is, for the most part, a positive attribute. "I see IELTS as better than TOEFL in that way because it has a face-to-face interview and tests all of the techniques in English," he said. Still, Tran noted, this type of speaking assessment could create further disparities between students who have and have not had access to native speakers or a quality education in spoken English.
Some students "don't have a chance to speak to foreigners, so they cannot speak very well, but once they are in the States, their speaking will be much better," he said.
Another important consideration is cost. When the Graduate School decided to accept IELTS two years ago, part of that decision was based on cost differences, said Chad Galts, director of communications for the graduate school. At the time of the policy change, TOEFL was more expensive than IELTS, Galts said.
IELTS has a sliding fee scale, and payment is in local currency. While TOEFL has required payment in U.S. currency in the past, the ETS is now moving toward varying the test's price based on national income averages, according to Watkins. Both tests really "cost about the same," he wrote.
Despite the change in admissions policy, very few students applied to the College or the Graduate School using IELTS in the most recent application round, according to Galts and Ott.
Still, there could be a shift in the number of students who use IELTS on applications to Brown and other U.S. colleges and universities. "There's an upswing in what universities are accepting in terms of language proficiency tests," Meiron said.
Meiron noted that of the 100 schools that receive the highest number of international applications, most already accept both TOEFL and IELTS.
Regardless of the accuracy of a given test, real-life application of language skills is another matter altogether.
"A lot of things are cultural adjustment that get interpreted as language, and it's hard to tease apart," Gourlay said. "Concerns about what's polite or appropriate might keep people from expressing themselves comfortably, or they might be transferring patterns of communication that are culturally different."
"The skills that you need for the TOEFL, and those for living in Providence are quite different," said Pedro Flombaum GS, who is from Argentina and took TOEFL. Learning to speak once a student arrives at Brown requires "a different kind of training," he said.
