Nowadays, the TOEIC program provides measures of English proficiency in all
four language domains. Comprehensiveness, however, has not always been a hallmark
of the TOEIC program. As suggested above, from its beginning in 1979 and for its first
27 years, the program offered a single test that covered only reading and listening
skills. Although this test proved to be quite successful in terms of usage, occasionally
TOEIC users lamented the fact that some test takers obtained very high reading and
listening scores, but were seriously deficient with regard to their overall ability to communicate.
To address this concern, in 2006 the program introduced measures of speaking
and writing.
Despite the current availability of a comprehensive battery of assessments, some
TOEIC users have, possibly because of time or financial constraints, chosen to use only
portions of the TOEIC test battery. Although efficient, this strategy could be unwise, as
testing too selectively may provide a less-than-adequate estimate of English language
proficiency. As a result test score users may, as evidenced in accounts in the Korean press
for instance (Choi, 2008), be dissatisfied if test takers fail to meet on-the-job performance
expectations. Ironically, this was the concern that prompted the development of
additional TOEIC tests in the first place.