ETS reviews

This organization continues to try to sell the "ETS" name, but this absolutely not the same research based, quality first, mission driven organization it was before, All the top 3 levels of leadership have been replaced with new people and almost 100% of them had no previous education or assessment industry experience, all are cronies of some new leaders, and none of them cares about maintaining the values of this once great institution. All C-suite leaders care about is marketing themselves on LinkedIn and spending ETS monies traveling the world to build their own careers and pad their resumes. CEO and all new leaders talk continuously about AI but they know nothing about how it works, have no real strategy and invest nothing in building skills or capabilities. All caring and knowledgeable employees are being laid off and jobs are being offshored. CEO wants 90% of ETS to be in India, including core research, assessment development, AI and Tech roles, for reasons that are still unclear to everyone. Offshoring ETS is not something he talks about externally. ETS has been good to me for my time here, so I'm not being bitter, just extremely sad to see a once fantastic institution go down the drain like this.

With recent disasters, ETS would no longer exist were it a private business without protected status as a quasi-governmental institution, but it's hard to imagine its survival if any competitor is allowed to step in or even if the managerial incompetence simply continues. So far, it has been “too big to fail.” So far. When I started, focus was on quality over quantity. Then, they instituted an AI called eRater as part of a consensus with two humans, lowering quality and temporarily cutting back on scoring opportunities. Next came a new test, rubric, and set of prompt variants that failed because a vast majority of test takers were not flexible enough in their writing strategies to adequately respond to the new prompts. The failure has never been acknowledged, and some measures to preserve the new variant system and repair the damage it did are dubious at best. More recently, dramatic breakdowns in test administrations have led to major contract losses. The UK has broken off ties with ETS over utter chaos. The Texas STAAR debacle was a similar loss. Finally, ETS hired a huge number of raters for the massive SAT program, the contract for which it promptly lost. This marked a striking break in relations with employees. For years, ETS had a very ethical and civilized approach to its employees, and provided various perks. ETS used to be a friendly company. Emails are now terse and can be threatening in tone. An instance of a bygone perk is if a shift were canceled within 24 hours of start time, employees would be paid for the full shift. Recently, it changed to being paid for half the shift. ETS did not mind scheduling overtime shifts during crunch times, but ETS, Instead of firing the army of new hires for the failed SAT contract, bulldozed a glut of them into other programs to drive down pay. The new rater pool siphoned shifts from longtime raters, and all were given a staggering pay cut, often over $6 per hour. Along with the pay cuts came reduced opportunities for scoring. It's hard to see ETS' new direction as anything but spurred by upper-level incompetents attempting to balance losses from their failures on the backs of lower-level employees. Rater agreements with ETS never promised much, but the company actually delivered good opportunities and communicated in a civil manner. Now, you can’t count on decent pay or respect, and communication with the company has a certain Eastern Bloc feel.