Michael Goodine's Blog, page 20

You Should Read More – Part 56

I continued my “Norton Library Podcast” read along this month by reading “Dubliners” (which has been a favorite short story collection for some time.  I think many followers of the blog will enjoy this short story collection.  Though the stories were published more than a century ago they are accessible and easily comprehensible.  You could […]

Latest News Roundup on Substack

Here’s a direct link to my latest English testing news roundup over on Substack.  If you want to get this sort of thing in your email inbox every now and then look for the subscribe link in the article. I was happy to see that the substack was referenced in this article over on PIE […]

More Details, re: TOEIC Link

I stayed up real late to watch a webinar about the new TOEIC Link Test.  I learned a few things that are worth passing along: The full 4-skills version of the test takes about 81 minutes to complete.  Compare that to the 200 minutes it takes to complete the 4-skill version of the regular TOEIC. […]

Duolingo English Test Experimenting with Local Images

There is an interesting experiment going at the end of the DET practice test.  Duolingo seems to be trying out “describe-the-picture” tasks that are based on images connected to the test taker’s locality. I’m in Korea and received a picture of a scene containing elements that would be immediately familiar to most people here.  After […]

TOEFL User Account Updated!

The TOEFL website and testing process has been spruced up. I’m seeing an overhauled user account, which is nice and tidy. The user account now highlights a trilogy of videos explaining how to complete the at-home test, how to set up the secondary camera and how to use the ETS Secure Browser (now referred to […]

Stay Nimble

I was researching historic test volumes for a client using the wayback machine. I spotted an announcement from the IELTS partnership that the IELTS test was taken 3.5 million times in 2018. And today? If we combine figures from the most recent annual reports of the British Council and IDP Education we get a total […]

Updated HOELT Tender

On April 10, the UK government posted an updated tender for the forthcoming HOELT test.  I haven’t seen any reporting on this, so it may be useful to share a few notes. The tender now lists estimated contract dates of August 2026 to August 2031, with a possible extension to August 2034.  Interestingly, the total […]

Who Takes What: UK Undergraduate Admissions

Today’s entertainment is a list of which tests are accepted for undergraduate admissions in the United Kingdom. I’ve looked at the 20 mainstream universities with the most non-UK students per HESA. This is a trickier exercise than examining American and Canadian schools. Here tests from the SELT list are widely accepted (but sometimes with exceptions), […]

TOEFL Gets a Secondary Camera Requirement for At-Home Test

It appears that the at-home TOEFL will soon require the use of a secondary camera. LanguageCert and Duolingo have had this requirement for a little while. The requirement will begin rolling out in select countries on April 18 2025. New countries will be added in blocks between then and May. Affected test takers have received […]

TOEFL Gets a Secondary Camera

It appears that the at-home TOEFL will soon require the use of a secondary camera. LanguageCert and Duolingo have had this requirement for a little while. The requirement will begin rolling out in select countries on April 18 2025. New countries will be added in blocks between then and May. Affected test takers have received […]