One other major initiative the SOPHAS committee is working on is to convince ETS and the GRE board to allow GRE designations to be sent to centralized application services.  GRE approved a designation for SOPHAS in 2006 in error, and a year later notified us that they would be deactivating this designation.  Representatives from several schools met with ETS staff in July 2007, and based on that meeting, we were hopeful that the GRE board would revise its policies. However, we were notified in December 2007 that the GRE board decided not to allow designations for centralized application services and that the SOPHAS designation would be discontinued in July 2008.   As some of you may have seen, an article about this situation was featured in the February 4 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education (see the article here ).

Because this decision places an extra burden on both applicants and schools, we are working with a number of other associations in a similar situation, such as Physical Therapy, Physician Assistants, Speech-Pathology, and Veterinary Medicine to influence ETS.  All of these associations agreed that allowing the scores to be sent directly is in the best interest of applicants and admissions' offices alike.  In a coordinated effort with these groups, we will be sending template letters to each of your school by the end of February, and will ask that your faculty, students and staff send letters of support for our request to ETS.  We are hoping that if they realize the implication of their decision, they will reopen communications with us about this issue.

The reason given to us by ETS was concern was for equity for non-participating schools.  ETS does not seem to realize that ASPH is the membership association of all CEPH-accredited schools and that the creation of SOPHAS was done with ASPH Board approval.