Here are a few photos from outside the TOEFL test center at the Fulbright Korea building. It’s about a 500 meter walk from Gongdeok Station – near the eastern end of Gyeongui Line Forest Park. I couldn’t take any pictures inside, but you can access a cool “virtual tour” and some photos from the ETS Naver blog.
TOEFL tests are administered on three different floors. A total of 245 (!!) test takers can be accommodated at the same time. To make things easier, the seats are spread across seven separate rooms.
Despite the large size of the test center, everything went smoothly. I was happy with my keyboard, mouse and monitor. I could easily take notes, as there was sufficient elbow room between me and the test takers on either side of me. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this test center has the new noise-cancelling headphones from ETS, which do help to block noise from the rest of the room. I think they run a white-noise machine as well. That probably doesn’t make a difference, but it’s the thought that counts.
There are semi-clean bathrooms on every floor of the building and hand sanitizer just outside the testing room. There are lockers for your belongings. They can be locked using an electronic keypad, but no one bothers.
I showed up 40 minutes early and there was already quite a crowd. I was permitted to start right away (which is a standard thing in TOEFL testing). That might be a good idea for most people, since it makes it possible to do the speaking section without a lot of background noise.
Interestingly, the administrators posted the names of everyone taking the test (and, later on, everyone taking it on Sunday). Based on that information, it looks like they administered about 250 tests over the weekend. That’s quite a lot… and it doesn’t include the two Wednesday administrations. There are also at least 15 more test centers in the country, including a big one in Gangnam with 114 seats, and a tiny one on Jeju Island with 22 seats that hosts one administration per month. It is also worth mentioning that the at-home TOEFL is fairly popular here.
Indeed, TOEFL is a pretty big deal in Korea. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Fulbright hosts more than ten thousand TOEFL administrations each year. Back in 2022, Korean was the first language of 7.8% of all TOEFL test takers (the third biggest group, behind a catch-all “Indian” language category that made up 13.2% of all test takers). Given the factors that have impacted test volumes in India since then, Korea may well be the second biggest offshore market for the TOEFL at this time (behind China). Note that Korean was the first language of only 0.8% of IELTS test takers that year.
Anyway. Below are a few of my own photos. You can see that they also run tests for Pearson, Kryterion, Inc., PSI Services LLC and Meazure Learning . EducationUSA has offices in this building as well, but the doors were locked and I couldn’t collect any pamphlets.
