The policy regulating the SPEAK and TSE is established by the Graduate Council, the body charged with developing all policy issues to related to graduate education at UCI.

The Graduate Council approved a request to offer the SPEAK (Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit) test on campus as an alternative to the TSE (Test of Spoken English). The Humanities Instructional Resource Center administers the SPEAK test on campus, with the cooperation and support of the Program in Academic English/ESL , the Office of the Dean of Humanities, the Graduate Division and the Division of Undergraduate Education.

As part of the approval to offer the SPEAK test, the Graduate Council requires that the raters we use be normed on a regular basis. In addition, the Director of the English as a Second Language Program at UCI will provide oversight to further ensure reliability.

Offering of the SPEAK test at UC Irvine is not meant to replace the TSE, IELTS or TOEFL iBT completely but rather to offer students an alternative to those tests. Advantages of taking the SPEAK test at UCI are location, lower cost, and faster score reporting. The tests are equivalent: none is less difficult than the others.

The contact person for the SPEAK test is Judi Franz, Director of the Humanities Instructional Resource Center: judi.franz@uci.edu. Registration is handled online only, in cooperation with the UCI Testing Office. Complete instructions for registering for SPEAK @ UCI can be found here.

Last updated: June 20, 2008 2:36 PM