How to PTE Sub-Scores to Predict SPEAK Test
The Test of English as a Foreign Language (PTE), produced by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), has been in use in institutions of higher American education since the 1960s as a means of measuring incoming international students’ English proficiency. But like any test, the TOEFL is imperfect. For instance, whereas a high TOEFL score may be sufficient to admit an international student to an American graduate school, many colleges and universities require more rigorous proof of a student’s English proficiency—often in the form of a passing score on a school-specific oral assessment—if he seeks employment as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA).
To mitigate this risk, forecasting models which use the TOEFL sub-scores of Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading to forecast SPEAK test outcome are applied. A student’s sub-scores act as predictive inputs to each model, which outputs the posterior probability of his SPEAK test failure. Bayes Theorem provides the structure required to obtain this probability, and the multivariate meta-Gaussian distribution captures the stochastic dependence between the sub-scores.