While doing some research for a freelance writing job, I came across The Roman Empire:  A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press.  Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series now includes more than 500 titles.  Each one describes a topic in about 200 pages in a fairly accessible style.  And they are cheap, too.   The series could be really great for people who want an easy and fun way to improve their academic reading skills.  I suppose that titles related to history will be most relevant to the TOEFL.  Remember that TOEFL passages are supposed to simulate articles from freshman-level university textbooks (and sometimes they are lifted directly from such books).  These books are somewhat comparable to such textbooks.

Meanwhile, during my recent holiday in Canada, I snagged a few old issues of “Science News” from the library discard stack.   A few articles from the November 6 2021 issue stood out as particularly relevant:

I also read the November 20, 2021 issue of the same magazine:

  • How these sea-loving mangroves ended up far from the coast is a perfect practice article.  It describes a thing called a “relict ecosystem,” which is when an ecosystem shows adaptations to conditions that are no longer relevant to it.  I think one of ETS’s practice questions is about “relict adaptations” in animals.  Basically the same thing!
  • Here’s an article about links between Olmec and Maya societies of mesoamerica.  Again, this sort of thing is just what the TOEFL test creators like to include in the reading section.

There are actually many more great articles in both of the magazines, but I will leave it at that.  I’ll be back next month after I work my way through a few more science mags.  I think I have enough of those on hand to cover both the November and December columns.  

A couple days ago the Daily Princetonian published an open letter urging Princeton University to accept the Duolingo English Test. The author’s heart is in the right place, but the article is full of incorrect and inaccurate statements about language testing. Perhaps someone from ETS or IDP Education Ltd should contact the paper about those.

Worth noting are the following errors:

1.  TOEFL and IELTS test-takers are not charged twenty dollars to send their results “to each and every university” they apply to. TOEFL includes four free score reports. IELTS includes five free score reports. The PTE includes unlimited free score reports.

2.  I think the author mixed up the “Pearson Test of English” and the “Preliminary English Test”. The latter is not used for university admissions. It was also renamed some years ago.

3.  Russians are not required to leave their country to take the TOEFL. The test can be taken from their homes, inside of Russia.

4.  The Educational Testing Service is not run by Princeton alum Robert Murley.

5.  The Educational Testing Service is not headquartered in Princeton. It is headquartered in nearby Lawrence Township.

I learned a few days ago that the TOEFL iBT Home Edition has been taken 467,000 times since it launched in March 2020.  If we assume that the TOEFL is taken about a million times per year, we might assume that the Home Edition accounts for about 20% of all sittings.  However, that figure is likely higher as the Home Edition’s availability was limited for most of 2020.

This is only mildly interesting, of course, but I mention it here because ETS doesn’t usually provide such numbers.

According to SEC filings from August, revenue for the Duolingo English Test in Q2 2022 was $8,036,000.  That’s almost exactly the same as Q1 2022, and Q4 2021.  It is up about three million dollars from a year ago.

At $49 a pop, we might extrapolate that the test was taken 164,000 times in the quarter. The actual number is probably a little bit higher than that due to discounts and free tests.

Using the same math, we can assume the test was taken about 630,000 times in the twelve months ending June 30, 2022.  That’s quite an accomplishment given reports that the TOEFL iBT is taken about a million times a year.

Here are the historic revenues:

Q2 2022 – 8,036,000
Q1 2022 – 8,080,000

Q4 2021 – 8,095,000
Q3 2021 – 6,695,000
Q2 2021 – 4,833,000
Q1 2021 – 5,035,000

Q4 2020 – 4,197,000
Q3 2020 – 5,607,000
Q2 2020 – 4,598,000
Q1 2020 – 753,000

Here’s the announcement of winners for the 2022 edition of the Barron’s TOEFL Scholarship.  If you have not yet heard from Dr. Sharpe be sure to check your spam folder.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year’s Barron’s TOEFL Scholarship competition! 

There were more essays this year than any time in the past, and the committee had a very challenging task to select the winners.

The names of the Scholarship Recipients are listed below.

Superior Essays: Full Scholarships $200

  • Bidisha Chakraborty, India
  • Margie Dayanna Parra Morales, Colombia
  • Gabriella Sabbathini, Indonesia
  • Jasim Uddin, Bangladesh

Excellent Essays: Partial Scholarships $100

  • Camila Gomez Lopez, Colombia
  • Neha Gothwal, No country identified
  • Arnold Hategekimana Kirwa, Rwanda
  • Yasin Khamosh, Afghanistan
  • Lemessa Tolossa Kumsa, Ethiopia
  • Aneta Nataliya, Ukraine
  • Fahima Akhter Purni, Bangladesh
  • Amada Silva, Brazil 

I updated the TOEFL to Duolingo Score equivalency tracker for October.  The tracker follow the TOEFL and Duolingo English Test score requirements at 17 schools in the USA, UK and Canada.  I’m mostly interested to see if schools adjust their requirements given changes to the score conversion charts published by the folks at Duolingo.

This month I spotted a couple of changes. Emory and Brown both increased their DET requirements.  Emory by ten points and Brown by five points.  Meanwhile, the University of Chichester appears to have stopped accepting DET scores.

Below are the current numbers.  Tap and scroll if you are on mobile.

School

Spring 2022

DET / TOEFL

August 11
DET / TOEFL

September 4
DET / TOEFL

October 10

DET / TOEFL

MIT

120 / 90

120 / 90

120 / 90

120 / 90

U of Toronto

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

Cornell

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

UBC

125 / 90

125 / 90

125 / 90

125 / 90

Emory

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

130 / 100

U of Arizona

100 / 70

100 / 70

100 / 70

100 / 70

Carnegie Mel.

125 / 102

125 / 102

125 / 102

 125 / 102

Brown

125 / 100

125 / 100

125 / 100

130 / 100

U of Utah

105 / 80

105 / 80

105 / 80

105 / 80

Rice

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

UCLA

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

120 / 100

Columbia

125 / 105

125 / 105

135 / 105

135 / 105

Dalhousie

115 / 90

115 / 90

115 / 90

115 / 90

City College of SF

85 / 56

85 / 56

85 / 56

85 / 56

De Anza College

95 / 61

95 / 61

95 / 61

95 / 61

Imperial College London

115 / 92

115 / 92

115 / 92

115 / 92

U of Chichester

95 / 79

95 / 79

95 / 79

 -- / 79

I found a copy of Kaplan’s TOEFL Pocket Vocabulary from 2018, and thought you guys might like a quick review.  

Here’s what you get in this book:

  • Thirty lists of words, containing 600 words in total.  Each includes a definition, sample sentence and other forms of the work (adjective, verb, noun, adverb, etc).
  • Twenty-one lists of idioms, containing 420 idioms in total.  Each includes a definition and sample sentence.
  • A handful of fill-in-the-blanks multiple choice exercises to help you remember the above.
  • No TOEFL practice questions.

This is probably a useful book, though some people might find the vocabulary a little too easy.  For your reference, here are the words in list 23: attitude, level, repel, uniform, trend, function, comment, lecture, emphasis, analysis, hypothesis, circumstance, strategy, tradition, regime, target, era, authority, generation, hierarchy. 

As you can see, some of those are “advanced” vocabulary, but others are pretty basic.  I suppose this means the book is suitable for an intermediate student.

More valuable, perhaps, is the collection of idioms.  Most ESL students will be able to learn quite a lot from those lists.  I don’t usually recommend the use of idioms on the TOEFL, but I know a lot of students (and some teachers) are obsessed with them.

If this book doesn’t appeal to you, I also recommend the “Barron’s” TOEFL Vocabulary book.  It contains somewhat more technical words and accurate TOEFL practice questions.