The Girls are Fighting! IELTS v DET + co
The British Council, IDP, and Cambridge English recently published a guide for universities / admissions officers on how to select an english assessment provider. This publication arrives in the context of several secular trends:
- Movement away from traditional, in-person exams to online, AI-graded assessments (I wrote about surprising DET numbers here)
- A turbulent international student base shaken by global anti-immigration sentiment and tit-for-tat visa policies (placements down 29% and IELTS test takers down by 18% according to IDP's 2025 Annual Report)
- Growing competition in the english proficiency market (see post on Pearson's response to DET here, as well as the increasingly long list of tests here)
- Rising language proficiency requirements in countries with immigration surpluses (aus, uk and france)
It's clear that a "western education" will become harder to achieve in the coming decade, making the value of one even more lucrative for overseas students. For test providers, this means they'll fight ever more entrants for a shrinking slice of pie, so I'm not surprised at all that IELTS has released this now as admissions cycles come to a close.
There are several shots across the bow here to newer/more "modern" entrants, as the publication critiques
- Providers that rely on multiple choice questions versus long-form syntheses
- Lack human evaluation of speaking / writing
- Present limited or non-transparent validation research
- Show weak alignment against academic tasks
Reading between the lines, this is a big shot at DET/PET type tests which have multiple-choice sections and short speaking/writing assessments, are AI-graded or AI-assisted, and are much newer and correspondingly have less research-backed results to show for it.
In pointing out what admissions officers need to watch out for, the implicit claim is obviously that IELTS is NOT like these other providers. Is that true? Let's stress test this with their point about validation research: the notion that IELTS is strongly correlated with academic performance, as I wrote about here, is a dubious claim. A meta-analysis published earlier this year of 130+ studies on IELTS/TOEFL and academic performance pointed to a weak correlation at best.
On the other hand, Duolingo has admitted (see link above) in recent earnings reports that one of the headwinds against DET performance is Universities rescinding validity due to concerns around quality. While they didn't specify what exactly "quality" meant, if it becomes widely perceived as mis-aligned against student performance or academic tasks, DET acceptance could see a stark drop-off.
Keep y'all posted on clapbacks (if any).