Cons? Everything is a con here at ETS. After my first full year I was expecting a raise. On Jan 4 of the next year, they sent us work-at-home raters an email saying we were all (TOEFL & GRE raters) having our pay cut down to $15/hr. GREs made more than us, and we TOEFL rates had been getting $18.54/hr. That's a 20% cut. Then a few months later they changed the minimum score rate from 12 to 16 essays per hour, a 25% increase. So we run out of essays sooner each week and entire days get canceled at the end of the week. These changes benefit us how? They only take the company and customers needs into account when they make changes, nothing ever benefits us employees, especially not raters.
I have a supervisor who told me he started in 2006 & has NEVER had a raise, but at least the supervisors have never received a pay cut like us raters. I started in September 2016 and have never had a raise. That's eight expletive/deletive effing years!!!! That would have still been like a pay cut alone had we never been given a cut just due to our pay not keeping up with inflation. So many changes have cut our hours too. It looks like they may have overhired a lot of people who only work Saturday or Sunday so that so many tests got graded, the last day of our workweek moved closer Monday. It used to start Saturday and end when we finished grading that round of tests, which would be Thursday or Friday in 2016. In 2018, this had moved up to Wed or Thursday. 2019 was Tues or Wed. This year it's usually Monday or even Sunday, but in 2020 they started allowing some test takers to take the TOEFL from their homes online & with an online proctor watching via a webcam, and we score these constructed responses on Thurs, but it's rarely more than 3-5 hours work. Now, we usually finish early on Mondays and Thursdays at around 5 hours when we were scheduled an 8 hour shift a month prior. We used to have some protection from this. In 2016, I might have started my workweek on Saturday or Sunday, with Friday being my last day. Then if they had to cancel my Friday shift less than 24 hours before due to us having run out of essays to score, they would pay us a kind of cancellation fee equivalent to half the day's pay. So 8 hour shifts got us paid $18.54*4 hours, or $75.16 if canceled the day before. On Thursday we might have finished our 8 hour shift in six hours, but occasionally after only three hours, but we would have been paid for the entire 8 hour shift. Now we have two end of the week days. Thursday is both the first and last day of the home tests so this day is often five hours, and Monday is the last day of the Saturday to Friday set of tests, lol! Just a couple of months ago, starting Dec 3, 2023, they stopped paying us for the full scheduled shifts when we finish early, and if they completely cancel our shift with less than 24 hours' notice, they no longer compensate us in any way. U sumbit ur availability a month in advance...so this means if it's like the last week of the month, you've been thinking for six weeks (since the 15 of the prior month) you were going to be working 8 hours on that day, so if you find out less than 24 hours before this shift that u will finish early or the day is being canceled u are being paid a lot less and without enough advance notice to make arrangements somewhere else to pick up a shift or two to replace this lost income. So in that case, and because we never get raises and took a huge pay cut, it was fair for them to pay us for 'hours we didn't work'. Other ways changes have cut our hours, and thus the size of our paychecks: last year they replaced the opinion essay, a full-size essay, with a little discussion board response, so we go through these a lot faster and thus get paid fewer hours. Think how much this sucks for the supervisors, going from having nearly seven days a week they could choose from, to only being able to work Sat & Sunday, plus partial days Mon & Thurs. Some are part-timers, but this gives them less choice.
Other than getting that extra Thursday partial day that they expect you to be available for the whole eight hour period, nothing good ever happens working remote for this company as a constructed response rater/scorer (essay/discussion board post grader). Everyone gets pay increases or cuts together. If upper management took pay cuts with us, we maybe wouldn't have had...actually they could have given us raises..Our supervisors all get pay increases or cuts as a class or group. So far, they have only had hours cut due to ETS's greedy, uncaring policies, but haven't taken pay-rate cuts like us raters. Raters also don't get individual pay raises. We all are denied pay raises year, after year, together. And they prevent us from chatting with each other. U can only chat with ur supervisor, wonder why? My checks, my take-home pay in 2016 used to be $900 every two weeks. In 2018, about $600. In 2022, about $550. 2024: $425. Every policy change ever gives us fewer hours and less pay.
