Not quite understanding what I was signing myself up for, I accepted to be trained for TOEIC tests.
The company I tutor through asked me a while ago if I'd be interested in leading small groups for the TOEIC. I immediately started thinking: university students, groups of 5-8 students, earn $$$, fill the gap in income between the end of my internship and when my mythical job starts.
Yeah, so, I think what I actually signed up for is to be a proctor.
I just had to sit though this horrible hour and a half phone conference training session. I'm now fully trained in how to administer a TOEIC though. It was kind of funny, if you step back, because the women spent a bunch of time explaining how you had to use a pencil (and not a mechanical one! [although that's BS, no? mechanical pencils can have #2 lead, right?])to fill in the circles (not check them!) and after the candidates write their name in the blocks, they have to find the corresponding letter down in the circles and fill it in so the machine can read their name.
I never realized 12 years of public school plus SAT/ACT requirements would give me a skill so valuable as understanding how to take a Scantron test.
In case anyone out there is thinking about taking the TOEIC, or a friend of their's is, know that the proctors are all trained to watch out for baseball-manager-type gesture systems for cheating (nose=A, earlob=B), or the "I'll just write it on the label of my water bottle" crib.
And rest assured, the women who led the formation for ETS (which is based in Prince eh ton, New Jersey) explained that it's a non-profit dedicated to strong values, so just never mind those hefty fees and their for-profit subsidiaries.
I thought the hour training was going to tell a lot more about the format of the test so we would know how to prepare students, but like I said, it was just training to be a proctor. And I'm kind of dumb: I didn't even find out if I'll get paid for the training session I just had to do. We'll see what comes of all this...
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