Protecting the ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines Protects Learners, Ensures Accuracy, and Promotes Confidence
ACTFL’s name is synonymous with the gold standard for assessing language proficiency and performance. As such, we take very seriously our responsibility to learners, families, and employers to protect that reputation, ensuring their continued confidence in the world-class quality of our products and services.
The ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines were developed to provide consistent national criteria to help learners, educators, and administrators understand the path to proficiency. In addition to ACTFL’s rigorous official testing program, the ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines are freely open for use by students, educators, and administrators throughout the world for non-profit, educational purposes when used in their entirety with credit to ACTFL. ACTFL embraces such classroom, school, district and state-wide approaches to increasing understanding of proficiency and proficiency outcomes in such contexts. The ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines cannot be used for for-profit purposes.
Every day, academic institutions, government agencies, and private corporations around the globe rely on ACTFL® assessments to make decisions about academic placement, program evaluation, professional certification, hiring, and advancement opportunities. Such scores need to be iron-clad, as they are often a determining factor in critical moments—being admitted to college as a first-generation student or certifying a medical interpreter who will provide patients with life-saving language access, as two examples.
Having developed, refined, and expanded the ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines over the past forty years in alignment with cutting-edge research, ACTFL’s trademarked brand has become synonymous with its carefully crafted and copyright protected guidelines, and we have an obligation to safeguard that they always be used accurately in authorized ways. Unfortunately, we have recently needed to take action in response to Avant Assessment’s false and misleading claims that its tests produce ACTFL® scores. An official ACTFL® score is provided through assessments solely administered by Language Testing International (LTI), ACTFL’s exclusive licensee.
Trademarks and other intellectual property must be actively protected to be maintained—not only upon receipt, but every time they are challenged. By controlling the credibility and use of our assessments, ACTFL has earned the trust of individuals and businesses worldwide as a leader in the field. We do not take this trust lightly: In protecting our trademark, we protect everyone who depends upon these assessment tools and who has invested significant time, effort, and financial means in building the language skills represented by their scores. We will continue to prioritize these relationships moving forward by preserving rigorous standards for the use of the ACTFL® Proficiency Guidelines.