All the Taste and Dignity of Vegas Brought to Education
I have started getting TOEFL data ready for the Ask Olli index. I did a teaching TOEFL course about seven years ago, but I have never taught it so I decided that I need to refresh my knowledge.
So, after reading a bit about the different TOEFL flavours now available, I started looking for an online TOEFL practice exam.
I was incredibly lucky with the first site that I found. I could have claimed prizes for being the 10,000th visitor, the 999,999th visitor, and the 1 millionth visitor. Despite my incredible luck, I was quite annoyed with the ads since, on some of the pages, the ads would actually block the exam’s questions and answers and there was no way of closing the ads. The ads are so annoying that I had to close the browser window in the background to write this.
What really made me want to laugh, was the bright green flashing ad that kept appearing over the reading portion of the exam. What was funny about this? The reading was about epilepsy. If you are prone to epilepsy, don’t visit this site.
The exam itself actually seemed pretty good. It had a few of the tricks used to fool students in multiple-choice exams, but I need to get more experience with TOEFL exams to really make an informed opinion.
I’ll keep looking looking for better stuff, but this TOEFL practice exam has to be one of the worst examples of advertising on educational websites. I don’t block ads because ads are what pay for all the free content on the web, but the ads on this site were so obnoxious that I seriously considered turning off Javascript and looking for an ad blocker.
It is difficult to make much money off of a website. The really obnoxious, flashy ads may pay a little more now, but they also send visitors running for ad-blockers. This will hurt everyone in the long run. It hurts the site with the horrid ads, other innocent sites that lose ad revenue, and ultimately visitors because sites getting less money can spend less on content.
I really do believe that webmasters are largely to blame for ad-blockers and cookie-blockers. Not all webmasters, but it only takes a few bad examples blinded by the possiblilty of short-term profit to hurt everyone. It is only natural to want to block ads from sites like this.