North Korea Rocks TOEFL

The statistics are in and it seems that having foreign teachers in the classroom makes absolutely no difference in the all-important TOEFL scores for Asian students.

North Korean and South Korean students are reported to have almost equal scores on the Internet based TOEFL exam (iBT). America's Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on February 14th that the average score for North Korean students was 69 out of 120 while South Korean students scored 72. This surprising statistic not only suggests North Korea is thinking ahead to the future and foreign trade, but they were also able to equal the South without spending millions of dollars on ESL education.

In South Korea, the TOEFL score is used for University admissions and it greatly influences employment opportunities after graduation. Millions of dollars are spent annually on public and private English as a Second Language education. Some of this money is spent recruiting and employing native-English speakers to teach and prepare students for the TOEFL test. But if North Korea, which does not have ESL education programs like the South, can achieve similar results on ESL standardized testing, then it is time to consider two possibilities: perhaps foreign teachers in the classroom are of no benefit for students taking an Internet-based test. Foreign teachers are not hired in the North. And if this is true, then perhaps this will result in a decrease in demand for foreign teachers in the South. But there is one more important possibility to consider in light of the iBT TOEFL test results: perhaps people shouldn't put too much weight behind Internet based testing.

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By Sean McCall