Educational Testing Service

Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, but has a Princeton address. ETS develops various standardized tests primarily in the United States for K–12 and higher education, and it also administers international tests including the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication), Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General and Subject Tests, and The Praxis test Series—in more than 180 countries, and at over 9,000 locations worldwide. Many of the assessments it develops are associated with entry to US tertiary (undergraduate) and quaternary education (graduate) institutions, but it also develops K–12 statewide assessments used for accountability testing in many states, including California, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia. In total, ETS annually administers 20 million exams in the U.S. and in 180 other countries. ETS is a U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization created in 1947 by three other nonprofit educational institutions: the American Council on Education (ACE), The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and The College Entrance Examination Board. ETS was formed in 1947 to take over the testing activities of its founders (whose organizations were not well suited to running operational assessment programs), and to pursue research intended to advance educational measurement and education. Among other things, ACE gave to the new organization the Cooperative Test Service and the National Teachers Examination; Carnegie gave the GRE; and the College Board turned over to ETS the operation (but not ownership) of the SAT for graduating high school students. In keeping with the purposes for which it was established, ETS developed a program of research that covered not only measurement and education but also such related areas as statistics, educational evaluation, and psychology, particularly cognitive, developmental, personality, and social psychology.