It's the TOEIC time of the year

It's that time of year again, trying to get first-year students excited about taking the TOEIC or TOEIC Bridge test again. They don't, for the most part, know what it is, but they have had an opportunity to register for free classes for it this week. So today I spent some time telling them about the test. In preparation for the explanation I found some interesting data from the ETS people.

• First is that test takers by geographical region goes Japan-72%, Korea-15%, and Other-13%. Unfortunately, Japan's mean score (451) is, out of 30 countries shown, second from the bottom.
• Vietnam has a lower mean score. (446).
• Test takers in managerial posts account for 333,962 people, non-managerial posts 161,315. Twice as many employed people take the test than students.
• The largest number by profession was for those in Marketing or Sales (98,408).
• The next largest group was "Clerical." (45,073)
• Most of the takers use English "almost every day." (89,420) The next largest group was "2-3 times per week." (53,293)
• Asia's mean score's (518) were 13% higher than Japan's (451). Europe's mean score (673) was 33% higher.

My pitch was that students could perform significantly above average if they spent 30 minutes a day, five days a week for the next 3.5 years in focused study only for the test. With that kind of very manageable effort, they would be irresistible to many companies.

It's hard to tell how convinced they were.