Our History

ETS was founded in 1947 when the American Council on Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the College Entrance Examination Board contributed their testing programs, a portion of their assets and a number of key employees to form an independent nonprofit organization under the leadership of Henry Chauncey.

In creating ETS, our founders brought to life a concept proposed a decade earlier by Harvard University President James Conant. Conant's belief was that a single organization devoted to educational research and assessment could make fundamental contributions to the progress of education in the United States.