TOEFL Access: Helping Universities Find Tomorrow’s International Students

For 60 years, TOEFL has played a vital role in international admissions. And as the pursuit of overseas students grows more complex, our extensive knowledge network can play a larger role in your recruitment and admissions efforts. In short: We’d like to be more than just a score.

Today, universities compete with a growing range of global institutions to find and evaluate students, many of whom are arriving in top destinations from locations where universities may lack a strong recruiting presence or historic context.

To address these challenges, TOEFL is launching a new data insights platform for universities, offering solutions for frontline recruiters and admissions officers, to help you discover and evaluate hidden gems who are ready to excel in the classroom and beyond.

New Student Insights Platform

To start, we’ve built a student insights dashboard that helps admissions officers make better decisions by understanding a student’s profile in the context of similarly situated peers.

Rather than evaluate every candidate’s English ability in a contextless void, our new tool allows you to compare applicants’ TOEFL scores – across all four English skills – to those of in-country peers. You can also track score trends by country.

We’re also offering an overview of all of your TOEFL scores going back several years. This longitudinal perspective offers insights into score trends over time and will help you make key strategic decisions, like changing cutoff scores or allocating recruitment resources.

The platform will also help you track the volume of scores you receive by country and region, offering a view of surprising sources of strength, as well as areas that may need an additional recruitment boost.

Lastly, TOEFL Access will offer insights on the institutions receiving the most interest from your own applicants, allowing you to analyze how applicants perceive your university.

Our dedicated in-app customer support will also offer a better experience for institutions, including 24/7 assistance from our AI-driven chatbot (“Quinn”), an in-house expert on every component of the TOEFL exam.

Modernized TOEFL Search Results

In addition to the new dashboard, we’ve modernized the TOEFL search results experience, which is currently offered in our ETS Data Management system (“EDM”). On the TOEFL Access platform, which will replace EDM, you’ll find:

• Efficient Candidate Filtering. Quickly find applicants with detailed filters for scores, date range, region, and status.
• Comprehensive Applicant Overview. Access a student’s detailed scores and personal data with a single click.
• Streamlined Decision-Making. View real-time status and actions for each candidate, enabling faster admissions processing.

And our augmented score report interface offers a cleaner, more intuitive glance at each candidate’s score profile, including:

• Detailed Score Breakdown. See individual scores for each section—Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing—for a comprehensive assessment.
• Performance Insights. Highlight top scores across multiple test attempts with MyBest™ scores, providing a fuller picture of the applicant’s abilities.
• Student Media Samples. Easily access audio and video samples of the speaking and writing sections, offering a deeper understanding of the applicant’s English skills.

These features will give you a more holistic look at each candidate’s English proficiency, helping you make more informed admissions decisions, while also giving a bird’s eye view of your applicant pool.

The new platform will also integrate with Slate, Oracle PeopleSoft, and Salesforce to help streamline the admissions process, aiding your efforts to make data-driven decisions.

And while we’ve focused our initial efforts on the admissions platform, we plan to soon launch a recruitment tool that will help universities conduct more targeted outreach, identify truly qualified leads, and allocate recruitment resources more efficiently. More on this soon!

Early User Feedback

We’re very excited about TOEFL Access. But we recognize we have a vested interest. Here are a few testimonials from early adopters during our pilot phase:

• TOEFL Access “will revolutionize how the admissions process is done with its forward-thinking and ease of use.”
• “It provides a lighter and cleaner experience. Information is easier to navigate with significantly more data points at your disposal.”
• TOEFL Access “is user friendly, easy to navigate, and provides features that makes verifying student scores extremely simple."

Transitioning to the TOEFL Access Platform

Curious about joining our new platform? It’s very simple! You can schedule a demo by emailing us at help.toeflaccess@ets.org. Please note that TOEFL Access is only currently available for U.S. universities. A global launch will occur later this year.

One other important note: There will be two versions of TOEFL Access, one free and one paid. The free version will offer everything you have today with EDM, including detailed score results.

The new dashboard, analytics, AI assistant, and recruitment solution will be provided in a single pricing package. More to come on this front!