IMS Global: Most people probably are familiar with ETS and believe they have a fairly good idea of what your organization is about. There is probably a good chance, however, that their perceptions are largely based on assumptions. What would you like readers to know about ETS?

GD: I think we would like people to know that ETS is more than just an assessment organization. We are much broader than that. Our products and services also promote learning and performance, and we support education and development for people worldwide. I think another thing that many people don't realize is that we like to contribute to the policy debate about critical education issues. An excellent example of this is the America's Perfect Storm report issued recently by our Policy Information Center. It really looks at the convergence of three powerful socio-economic forces that are changing our nation's future. Those forces are substantial disparities in reading and math skill levels, seismic economic changes (widening wage gaps), and sweeping demographic shifts (less education, lower skills). I think what the report concludes is that there are things that we can fix if we act quickly. A copy of the report can be downloaded from our website at       http://www.ets.org/stormreport.

IMS Global: Are your services limited to higher education?

GD: No, actually we serve from K-12 to post graduate school and beyond. We have about 3,000 employees working worldwide who provide educators and students with a variety of services. We also develop, administer, and score more than 50 million tests annually at more than 9,000 locations in more than 180 countries.

IMS Global: What role has technology played in the evolution of the services you provide?

GD: Well, as you can imagine, when we were formed in 1947, everything was done by hand. ETS was one of the first companies that was able to apply scanning and computing to large scale assessments. That probably started us on our technology trajectory, and today that has evolved into our ability to test worldwide on our new Internet-based testing platform. Our new platform can not only deliver the assessments that people are normally familiar with, such as the TOEFL and TOEIC tests, but it also captures speech in real time enabling ETS to measure a test taker's ability to speak English.

IMS Global: ETS recently received the Learning Impact 2007 Platinum Award for the CriterionSM Online Writing Evaluation service that is used in schools around the world. Please describe for us this application and how it is used.

GD: It's a Web-based instructional tool that helps students plan, write, and revise essays. It provides instant scoring and annotative diagnostic feedback in areas of grammar, usage, mechanics, style, and organization & development so that students can plan, write, and revise their essay and with the practice and feedback, improve their writing skills. We position it as an instructional tool to be used in schools and school districts so that the teachers can direct the writing assignments, and communicate with students about their flagged errors and comments to target their instruction. There's also an administrator portion of it to so that administrators can have a role in directing the Criterion service in the school or district. The service provides an opportunity for continuous improvement, essay by essay, assignment by assignment. Once a student hits the "submit" button, less than 20 seconds later, the document comes back with a holistic score and annotated diagnostic feedback provided within the essay.