I Took the New TOEFL

I took the new TOEFL yesterday in Seoul!  Below are a few notes while everything is still fresh in mind:

1. I was somewhat surprised that my fingerprints and palm prints were not taken. I guess ETS doesn’t do that, but it was done at all the PTE tests I took last year.
2. ETS has distributed custom noise-cancelling headphones to test centers around the world. They are excellent and will improve the in-person testing experience for a lot of people. 
3. I think the microphone calibration test has been adjusted, widening the acceptable range in the “audio visualizer.” That will likely reduce yelling at test centers, which is a common complaint. Regardless, I still recommend removing the visualizer entirely. I don’t think any other tests include one. 
4. I think the warning about templates given at the beginning of the test has been updated. It now says that memorized reasons and examples will receive “lower scores.” 
5. Overall, the test was broadly similar to the practice tests that ETS has published. That said, there are a few noteworthy differences. I’m not sure if I’m permitted to speak about them at length, but I suspect they will become well-known as more people take the test and more official materials are published. 
6. This is a roughly 90-minute test, including instructions. The description on the website is accurate.  I suppose most test takers will probably use about 85 minutes, as they can’t go back and use leftover time in the listening section. 
7. Speaking of timing, one insufficiently celebrated improvement is the presence of intuitive timers in the listening section.  Each listening question now has its own little timer that counts down to zero.  This compares favorably to the old TOEFL’s listening section, which had weird and unintuitive timers. 
8. The voices used throughout the test (instructions and items) were sometimes… not great. In a few cases, the AI voices used in shorter listening items had a noticeably odd cadence. On top of that, some of the conversations in that section were between speakers seemingly using microphones of wildly different quality, which was a bit jarring.  Test takers might hear a woman with a crystal clear voice (probably AI) talking to a man who sounds like he recorded his side of the conversation on his old Nokia flip phone. Thankfully, the academic lectures all sounded great.  They might have been recorded by real actors. 
9. One of the academic readings was super hard and contained a classic “stare at the screen for five minutes before picking an answer” question that the old TOEFL was known for. One of the others was about a topic I am pretty familiar with so I could breeze through it. 
10. It is worth noting how much engagement students have with the new reading passages, despite them being shorter than the ones on the old TOEFL.  In the old test, every reading question (except for one) was prefaced with something like “in paragraph 3…” and it was not necessary to go outside of that paragraph to find the answer. So while the article might have been 700 words, the test taker only engaged with ~140 words for each question (except for the last one).  That preface has been removed from the new test, so test takers engage with all ~200 words for every question. 
11. That said, with shorter articles the risk increases that pre-knowledge of the subject can be used to answer the questions without meaningful engagement with the article.  This occurred a few times on my test, but never really happened when I took the old TOEFL. Perhaps this occurs because the item writers have fewer details to work with when crafting questions.  I don’t suppose it happens frequently enough to impact score validity, but it is worth thinking about. 
12. Reduced dependence on multiple choice questions in favor of more interactive tasks that require more holistic(ish) engagement could address this. Other tests have already gone in this direction. 
13. The “build a sentence” UI is better than in the practice tests.  Clicking and dragging is much smoother.
14. The spontaneous conversation required in the “take an interview” task is pretty challenging. As expected, the questions were all about a single everyday topic… but I got one that doesn’t come up too often in my everyday life.  I actually chuckled a bit to myself when it was introduced at the beginning of the task. I fumbled around trying to quickly come up with some fake thoughts and opinions on it. This is something students will have to work on as they prepare for the test. 
15. Students should be warned about the beeps in the speaking section.  For the “listen and repeat” item they must speak after an audible beep is played.  Two minutes later they’ll start the “take an interview” item, where there is no beep.  I missed a few seconds waiting for a beep before I noticed that my timer was ticking down. 
16. I know there was much hullabaloo about the elimination of “niche topics like Greek mythology” during the TOEFL revision, but honestly it seems like the academic parts of the new test include a similar range of topics as the old one. Some were pretty darn “niche.”