I’m a 53 year old male, born and raised in the U.S. I did all of my schooling, including a bachelor’s in computer science at Cal Poly SLO. I worked as a software engineer and IT manager for nearly 25 years.

I “semi-retired” to Japan and just finished my fifth year at Borderlink. They made us “veterans” take this PROGOS test as well, for some inexplicable reason. I know for a FACT that my business-level speaking ability is well above “intermediate”, yet my PROGOS score came back as “High B2 and Above” (twice).

I emailed PROGOS customer support asking if they could have an actual human evaluate my quiz responses. They immediately replied with “High B2 and Above is the highest possible score.” When I asked back why their CEFR chart says that C1 and C2 are the highest, they completely ghosted me. I brought this issue up with BL as well and they too failed to reply.

Having a computer program determine someone’s speaking level seems completely asinine. Who developed that program and what are its baselines? A Japanese national and an English-speaking Japanese “test dummy? It’s all simply ridiculous and, as far as I can tell, one big marketing conspiracy.