As the confusion over the TOEFL exam registration process continued on Tuesday, Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test, said it would dispatch a senior executive to Korea to deal with the mess.
"On Tuesday, with the situation getting more sensitive in Korea, a senior vice president decided to visit Korea on Friday," an ETS staffer said.
Paul Ramsey, the senior vice president of ETS' global division, will meet with the local press on Saturday to explain the situation and how the company plans to fix it.
In March Ramsey said at a presentation in New York that the company was having problems with the TOEFL exam in Korea. He said that Korea was having the hardest time after the introduction of the IBT (Internet-based test), and the company was considering using non-educational institutes as well as universities for the tests.
Ramsey's trip is an extraordinary move for ETS. A staffer with the Korean-American Educational Commission, ETS' local service agent, said it's the first time an ETS executive has had to make such a trip since a staffer visited Korea to explain the TOEFL report card in 1980s.
ETS seems to be working hard to allay criticism for the fiasco, having emailed an apology for the situation to the Chosun Ilbo on Monday and announcing Ramsey's trip the next day. It is believed Ramsey will outline special measures to deal with the problem.
ETS began taking applications on its website for the special paper-based TOEFL exam for Korean students on Tuesday, but the site was paralyzed for a while after too many people tried to access it. The company said it would take applications online from 3 p.m., but applicants were unable to connect to the website (www.ets.org) for the first 20 or 30 minutes.
At the same time, however, several people posted messages to TOEFL-related Internet message boards claiming that they had successfully registered for the PBT (paper-based test). The limit of 8,000 applications was reached within two hours. The crush of applicants to the website included people trying to register for the PBT and people registering for other IBT dates.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education & Human Resources Development encouraged authorities at foreign-language high schools to drop their requirements for the TOEFL through the 2009 school year. An official from the Education Ministry said, "The TOEFL confusion occurred because an increasing number of elementary and junior high school students want to enter foreign-language high schools.
TOEFL is an evaluation means to enter universities in regions using the English language, and it is inappropriate to use the scores for Korean high school admissions since it is not related to courses at Korean elementary and junior high schools."
