This press release should interest anyone involved in preparing students for IELTS or the TOEFL.
Pearson PTE English Test (PTE Academic), a new English language test owned by Pearson and developed in collaboration with the Graduate Management Admission Council, will debut on October 26, 2009. The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), began working with Pearson in 2006 to conceive and develop a test that would more accurately measure the English language skills of students than existing exams. The computer-based test includes speaking and voice recording capabilities; score reports sent to schools will include a 30 second audio clip of the test taker's speech. Full text >>
COMMENT
Do we really need yet another test of English? I thought the IBT was supposed to test academic speaking skills. And I wonder how much this new test is going to cost. A 3-hour exam with voice recording isn't going to be cheap. The French have a good expression: "c'est une usine à gaz" (literally "a gasworks", but meaning an unneccessarily complicated creation that functions poorly).
