What is iTEP?
This is a question we at Boston Educational Services receive fairly often. The short answer is that it’s a series of English proficiency exams. But it’s more than that. It’s a new type of standardized test that rethinks everything from how the test is administered and scheduled, to how the scores and data are shared with institutions.
With a great deal of help from some gracious colleagues who agreed to appear in it, we created this video as an introduction to our exams and our philosophy.
Please share this video with anyone who is new to iTEP, or perhaps is familiar with one of our exams but not the others. We greatly appreciate all of the support and word of mouth promotion we receive from the iTEP community throughout the world, and hope that this video will prove a useful tool to those interested in helping us spread accessibility and efficiency in English proficiency testing.
Video transcript:
iTEP, or International Test of English Proficiency, is an English assessment test designed to be more convenient, comprehensive, and affordable for students and administrators alike. It can be taken on-demand over 90 minutes at secure test centers all over the world. In addition to iTEP’s detailed score report, administrators can access speaking and writing samples to get a more complete picture.
There are 3 types of iTEP exams.
iTEP Academic is used for admissions by colleges and universities all over the United States. Intensive English programs or IEPs often use the test for placement. It can even be taken at home in these cases. iTEP scores match up to CEFR levels and can easily be compared to other tests.
iTEP SLATE (Secondary Level Assessment Test of English) is specially designed for young learners and used by boarding schools and private high schools. In fact, iTEP SLATE is the most widely available and technologically advanced English test made for this market.
ITEP Business tests a speaker’s fluency in workplace English. It is used by large and small companies for hiring decisions, promotions, and progress monitoring.
Each iTEP exam is also available in its Core form, which lasts an hour and is scored immediately.
Denise Kinsella, Associate Dean, International Education Center, Santa Monica College: iTEP is an accurate and reliable measure of our students’ ability to speak English. It’s a very convenient test for them. It’s less expensive than other tests and we get the results much more quickly so we can make an admission decision without the student having to wait a long period of time. For us, iTEP has been a better measure of our students’ ability to be successful in their classes.
Roger Riske, President Emeritus, Educational Resource Development Trust: I’ve been working in the international secondary school exchange field for more than 30 years and I have found that the SLATE test developed by Boston Educational Services is by far the most reliable, secure, and user-friendly test available on the market. It gives secondary school admissions officers and counselors the necessary information to evaluate all aspects of students’ linguistic abilities: writing, reading, and understanding.