Thursday, September 23, 2010

retesticle

My saga with ETS continues. You'll recall my original delay in testing was caused by my mis-assignment to take the wrong test (I was listed for TOEIC). This got me a six-day reprieve. I experienced a second delay, however, when it turned out that my temporary password had expired. That got me one more extra day.

So tonight (Wednesday night, September 22, DC time for my readers in South Korea), I took the test, which was in two parts: Independent Writing and Integrated Writing. Long story short: I passed the first part (grading essays) and failed the second (grading focused responses). This was, strangely enough, exactly the opposite of how I expected to do, based on my performance in that tutorial. But something about the exam's second part (Integrated Writing) tripped me up, and I'm not quite sure what it was. As always, I'm unable to delve into specifics here, since we're bumping up against material that belongs to ETS.

I'm allowed a single retest, but I have no idea whether I'll have to redo both sections, or just the failed one. I hoping it's the latter, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that I'll need to jump through both hoops again.

Stay tuned.


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2 comments:

John said...

These big testing places are pretty full on. I would have to kill you if I told you too much about IELTS but we have regular reviews and to be accredited as an examiner I had to sit two examinations of 10 scripts each weighing 4 criteria per script. On top of that we have to recertify regularly and have a random audit of our testing.I just got my latest audit results in the post today. Really full on stuff. Luckily I passed on the speaking audit well. I am not looking forward to my second writing audit though.

Kevin Kim said...

ETS has its own measures in place to make sure its raters remain properly "calibrated," but once again, I run up against the wall of the confidentiality agreement.

Oh, look-- a hobbit!