Creator Capital Ltd Ord CTORF

Test For China

[warrenbuffet99]

U.S. firm to test China's English skills on the Net By Reuters, 01/10/02 BEIJING — Students of English in China will soon be able to have their writing skills tested over the Internet by a U.S. company. The U.S.-based Educational Testing Service, which created the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), said on Thursday students in China with access to Internet could use new technology to test their preparedness for TOEFL. "The whole process, between the time it is submitted and the student receives the score onscreen, is about 10 seconds," ETS Technologies' Chief Executive Richard Swartz told reporters in Beijing. ETS is the world's biggest private exams firm. Learning English has taken on a new urgency in Communist-run China, which has braced for a renewed wave of foreign visitors since joining the World Trade Organization and winning the bid to host the 2008 Olympics last year. One in eight of the 800,000 students who sit the TOEFL every year are Chinese, said Kirson Herbert, executive director at ETS for international development. The commercial online unit of ETS will use computers at its Princeton, N.J., headquarters to grade practice essays submitted via the Web site www.englishtide.com, run by Hong Kong-registered online learning firm Tide English Publishing Ltd., officials said. Under the deal, ETS Technologies would earn a percentage of the fees collected by Tide English from students submitting practice essays, Swartz said. But Tide is yet to decide what it would charge for the practice essay, a Tide executive said.