ETS: Nearly 100 Indian institutes recognise Graduate Record Examination

Amit Sevak, President and Global CEO of ETS

According to Educational Testing Service (ETS), an assessment firm, about a 100 Indian institutes now recognise Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores.

Administered by ETS, thus far GRE scores were mainly accepted by universities in the US, Canada, and a few other countries. The GRE is a standardised exam that tests the competency of students in areas like verbal and quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, etc.

“More and more Indian institutes are accepting GRE scores,” Amit Sevak, President and Global Education CEO, ETS, told Moneycontrol. This includes prominent colleges including IIM Calcutta, IIM Bangalore, SP Jain (Mumbai), and the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.

Further, NALSAR, Hyderabad, and Reliance Jio Institute, Mumbai, have also signed up recently. ETS is seeking to expand the acceptance of GRE to over 150 Indian institutions within this fiscal.

As per the Ministry of Education, as of 2020-21, over 48,000 foreign students from 163 countries were enrolled in Indian institutes of higher learning.

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In 2017-18, about 60,000 Indians had taken the GRE, which nearly doubled in about five years. With 1.1 lakh students taking the GRE in 2021-2022, India had the second-largest number of candidates after the US, with China a distant third (24,000 candidates). Between 2020-21 to 2021-22, the number of examinees in India increased 68 percent, signalling the growing popularity of the test.

The physical sciences, engineering, and business were the top streams of choice among those who took the test in India.

While the US has remained the most popular destination for Indian GRE aspirants, Canada and west Europe are among the top non-US preferences.

Progress on PARAKH

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) selected ETS to help set up India's first national assessment regulator, PARAKH, or the Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development.

PARAKH’s aims align with India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, with the new regulator being established as the nation’s premier, the official resource for all assessment-related information and expertise. The initiative will set norms, standards, and guidelines for student assessment and evaluation for all recognised school boards in India.

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Regarding the progress thus far, Sevak said that ETS was in the planning stages right now. “We're just literally planning and getting organised. We are identifying both international and local teams and assigning roles and responsibilities.”

To expedite the process, ETS is bringing in coordinators, technical experts, and psychometricians. Over the next few weeks, Sevak said that a number of experts in different fields would be coming to India to start planning and mapping out the different frameworks. “In a nutshell, we are in the hiring mode,” he added.

One of the areas PARAKH’s focuses on is to encourage schools to move from traditional assessments towards meeting the skill requirements of the 21st century. Sevak divides these skills in three buckets: functional skills (necessary skills required to do the work at hand), soft skills (communication, team work, time management, etc.), and skills that can be upgraded after some time.

Sevak believes the life of a skill is only four years (just two years if it's a digital skill). “This is the funny thing about skilling, we need to plan for the skill to be obsolete,” he said.

Foreign universities in India

Having been in the education sector for more than 20 years, Sevak said he has observed countries benefit immensely from the presence of foreign institutions in their geographies. Citing Malaysia as an example, he said that India can also become a hub for international students from nearby regions and countries such as the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Nepal, among others.

However, while setting up a campus in a foreign country, the big question is: is it going to be recognised by the UGC, in the case of India, or by universities in the student’s home country?

“ETS can play a role to help navigate that system through assessments, frameworks, credit, and measurement of learning progress. Today, ETS is recognised by 12,000 universities throughout the world,” Sevak said.

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As UGC moves forward, Sevak says ETS and the regulator will be discussing this. “We're going to be looking forward to seeing how we can help.”

In 2020-21, Nepal had the highest share of foreign students in India (28.26 percent), followed by Afghanistan (8.49 percent), Bangladesh (5.72 percent), Bhutan (3.8 percent), Sudan (3.33 percent) and the United States (5.12 percent).

The highest number of foreign students were enrolled in under-graduate courses (75.9 percent), followed by post-graduate courses (16.2 percent). About 7.9 percent of the students were enrolled in other courses (vocational, professional, Ph. D., etc).