National Testing Service
Listening, Learning, Leading
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| Founded | 2006 |
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| Headquarters | Islamabad, Pakistan |
| Products | NAT, General Subject Tests and General Assessment Test |
| Services | Testing, assessments and research for educational use |
| Website | nts.org.pk |
National Testing Service - Pakistan (NTS) is an organization in Pakistan that administers academic performance evaluation tests. It is similar to Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the United States. NTS offers two main types of tests, the National Aptitude Test (NAT) and the Graduate Assessment Test (GAT). NAT is aimed at students seeking admission to colleges and universities. GAT is aimed at graduates seeking admission to postgraduate education. NTS exams are also used to determine qualifications of students seeking advanced study abroad.
NTS is a Member of the International Association for Educational Assessment. It is also recognized by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. The NTS was developed to ensure quality educational standards in Pakistan and to "provide a national scale for comparative grading between institutes", consolidating examination boards under one administrating body. According to Shahid Siddiqui, director of The Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore School of Economics, tests implemented prior to the development of the NTS were criticized as not accommodating socio-cultural differences, resulting in a need for "an indigenous testing service that should design and develop testing materials within an indigenous context". Prominent Pakistani institutions like COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU), BUITEMS and Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE), The Islamia University of Bahawalpur (IUB) have made it compulsory for students seeking admission to have cleared tests conducted by NTS.
Controversy erupted in 2007 following the mandating of NTS testing, first announced by Khalid Maqbool, Governor of Punjab, with regards to admission to universities and later set aside by the government unless the laws regarding university admission were amended. Criticism included allegations that the services were inconvenient to access and prohibitively expensive to economically challenged students. Maqbool called for input from the vice-chancellors of Punjab's public universities on 4 June. That year, each university department was permitted to set its own entrance requirements, with six of 64 departments at Punjab University electing to utilize tests from NTS. In October 2007, the vice-chancellor of Punjab University, Muhammad Arif Butt, endorsed the use of NTS testing in all departments of the university. NTS director Haroon Rasheed said that no tuition centres are associated with the service and NTS exams will not be out of course.
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