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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Standardized English Tests, Including TOEFL, Are Halted in Iran - NYTimes.com

Standardized English Tests, Including TOEFL, Are Halted in Iran - NYTimes.com

Standardized English Tests Are Halted in Iran




WASHINGTON — The Educational Testing Service has announced that it is temporarily suspending registration for its tests in Iran, including the popular Test of English as a Foreign Language, in what may be one of the first tangible effects of the new sanctions levied against the country by the international community.

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Experts and Iranian expatriates were appalled, saying that if the sanctions prohibited Iranians from studying abroad, they would hurt precisely the kind of outward-looking young Iranians the West would like to help.
The Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, is a widely recognized measure of English proficiency and is often used by Western universities in evaluating international students for admission.
The statement posted on the E.T.S. Web site on Wednesday cited the United Nations Security Council resolution “affecting banks and financial institutions that conduct business in Iran.
“As a result of this resolution, E.T.S. is currently unable to process payments from Iran,” the statement said.
In an interview with the Iranian Mehr news agency, Ibrahim Khodai, an official at the

N.F.L. Youth Clinics Link Football Skills and Citizenship

A league official sees a direct connection between the N.F.L.’s efforts to clean up behavior and the more than 125 high school player development clinics the league is running around the country this summer.
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A SCHOOL’S LOSS Students from Columbia Secondary at a sidewalk memorial set up for their classmate, Nicole Suriel, 12.

How a Reward Led to a Tragedy at the Beach

Private fund-raising in public schools is a complex issue, one that is surely part of the chain of events that led to Nicole Suriel’s death.
David Blackwell

David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91

A statistician and author of influential academic papers on probability and game theory, he was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences.