Pearson Pandering

Is it just me or does the Pearson advertisement targeting the India market seem like a cringing exploitation of the Indian market?

Are Indians being specifically prejudiced by IELTS examiners in India? Or by foreigners? Having worked in India as an IELTS examining I have some anecdotes and opinions on the topic.

Let me just explain the series of video commercials, focusing on depressed Indian students whose smooth looking teacher blames accent bias or appearance for failure in the English tests. His solution is not to work on your English but to use the Pearson’s PTE with is AI examiner.

The data quoted states “62% of us use a fake accent”. This was taken from questionnaires of test-takers in India- a pretty strange question to ask those taking an English test because we all ‘fake’ accents to improve them or to help others around us.

Fake it til you make it– it’s how a learned Spanish in Latin America!

If ‘faking’ means tweaking your accent to fit your purpose, I would say 100% of native speakers do this often. We speak and dress to fit the audience or situation; our boss, our mother-in-law, the cool kids at school, a conservative colleague, an elderly neighbour, kids, the police… We change our accents depending on the English level of the audience to be helpful not bias.

Even when I’m in the USA or UK, I don’t use Australianism and make my accent more neutral to avoid them mocking me with “a dingo torked my baebee“. It’s not that Americans don’t understand it’s that it gets tiresome to hear the same jokes. Some Australians make their accent thicker because they think it’s fun to toy with them. To each their own, the point is we have many accents.

I try to fake a better accent in my second and third language, because if I use an English accent they don’t understand me. Point being, we all ‘fake’ accents to improve clarity and have more effective conversation.

Fluency over conformity

While the student in the Pearson’s campaign says ‘water’ three times, in three different but all perfectly acceptable accents, Smooth-Teacher-Type doesn’t reconfirm his confidence and say his accent is fine, work on your fluency. Instead, he says, in Hindi, that Pearson’s PTE understands 125 different accents. Well, so does your average native speaker and IELTS examiner, providing the speaker has a conversational level. But certain categories of India accent (and there are many types of Indian accents), we can’t understand unless the Indian tweaks his phonetic

Quite a lot of sounds are different among native speakers. It is not about one correct pronunciation, it’s about being understood in conversation.

All the people in this video below have effortless spontaneous conversational English, not the same sounds and they are understandable despite different accents. They are all 7-9 in IELTS.

Rumours of PTE Bias

My question about Pearson’s AI understanding 125 different accents: is it differentiating and judging them rather than scaling understandability (not a word, but it should be!). Does it think that certain accents are less acceptable and more prone to people of lower education or bad character? There is a lot of research in this area that I will share in my next blog, regarding AI and bias.

Ironically to add to this whole AI-is-not-bias campaign, Pearson recently (November 2024) introduced human intervention in the scoring process of the PTE for the “Describe Image” and “Retell Lecture”. This change, they say, aims to enhance accuracy and fairness by combining AI scoring with human review for content evaluation. While AI continues to assess oral fluency and pronunciation, human reviewers now verify the originality and relevance of the content.

But… maybe… Pearson have a point

As well as working as an IELTS examiner for one year in India, I have backpacked the country in my younger years and return in my later years as a journalist. I have many friends in India, and had many a conversation on a long train journey with a wise stranger or sitting on the side of holy lake…..Thinking about my experience in India, I realise Pearson do have a point- and it is an Indian specific point- so perhaps although I still call it pandering it is a clever campaign for India.

Many Indian test-takers that I met while travelling, worked in tourism and were quite fluent and capable of conversing with range of accent but felt intimidated and judged by their examiner who were of high castes or status.

Most Indian examiners have master degree in literature and were literature teachers at a school or university. They are highly educated but linguistic and literature are different subjects. Teaching or examining your native language and its culture is different from teaching or examining your second language as a subject.

Add to that, that the Indian education systems is built around memorization and one right-verse-wrong way, while the Western one is about scaling a range of skills, learning by doing and practical use. The IELTS examining in India and Australia is very different, and many native examiners find it frustrating and unfair.

I was recently asked by an Indian examiner whether I understood a set by a comedian from Liverpool. I did, 100%, and in fact his accent enhanced his humour. He also had perfect grammar and not a lot of slang. I wonder if the Indian examiner really wanted me to say I couldn’t understand him and that some Indian accents are better than some native accents. He said he thought that Americans wouldn’t understand the ‘scouse’ but I reminded the Indian examiner that this was the accent of the Beatles.

Which begs to ask if this problem is not an internal Indian one, so maybe Pearson do have a point in that market?

Sources:

Computer says no: Irish Vet fail PTE