One more Google Trends chart. This one shows interest in the search terms “IELTS” and “TOEFL” since 2004. As you can see, back in 2004 there was a lot of interest in TOEFL. Back then, IELTS was something of an afterthought. Today, though, IELTS is utterly dominant.
There is a lesson to be taught here.
Which is that it didn’t necessarily have to be this way. You could say that IELTS is at the top of the heap because of the increased importance of new receiving markets over the past twenty years. But I don’t think it was a given that a test from the UK would become the de facto English test for people headed to Australia. And, needless to say, it wasn’t a given that a test from the UK would be the thing taken by people headed to Canada. TOEFL probably shoulda cornered that market.
So what happened? Well, the TOEFL originally launched at some point before the beginning of recorded history and for several decades it was fairly dominant in its category. Meanwhile, the IELTS was handed down on stone tablets in 1989 and quickly grew in popularity. The data suggests that its popularity surpassed that of TOEFL sometime around 2009.
Note that the peak of TOEFL’s popularity, according to the data, was around 2006. This was the year that the old paper-based TOEFL was largely replaced with the TOEFL iBT (note that a few markets got the iBT in 2005). A key aspect of this transition is that the TOEFL jumped from being a roughly 2-hour test to a roughly 4 hour and five minute test. Four hours! Old timers will remember that the iBT included unscored content in either the reading or listening section, but might not know that the reading section could contain TWO unscored passages.
(Why so long? Well, remember that the original TOEFL tested neither writing nor speaking.)
To me, this is the key reason why the test declined in relative popularity. I’d say that the 2:44 length of the IELTS suddenly became a lot more attractive. I think this was a major reason why test takers started piling into that particular test.
The TOEFL was quietly shortened to just under four hours sometime in the early 2010s with the removal of the second unscored reading passage. In 2019 it hit about 3:20 with the removal of certain reading and speaking questions. In 2023 it was reduced to just over two hours with the removal of all unscored questions and the longer writing task. In each case the numbers were massaged to make the test look even shorter than it actually was. In 2026 the test will clock in at just under 90 minutes, according to information that is currently available. And that will include plenty of unscored material, so further reductions are entirely possible.
Test duration remains a big deal. People like short tests. Go figure. The PTE has eaten away at the IELTS in part because it has always been a roughly two-hour test. And the Duolingo English Test’s one-hour duration has helped it capture a lot of market share in recent years.
I wonder, though, if we have reached a test-duration floor. The length of the PTE was quietly increased a few months back when certain revisions were introduced. Even the Duolingo Test seems to be a sliver longer than it used to be due to the introduction of new integrated tasks a few months ago (not to mention the time it takes for test takers to carry out new security features). And the IELTS team seems to be in no rush to shorten their test. Meanwhile, to my jaundiced eyes it almost seems like the TOEFL team is actually a little embarrassed about the potential length of the new version of their test. And the so-called “long tail” of minor tests that trail the big four in popularity seem to be distinguishing themselves in ways that don’t relate to test length.
It will be interesting to watch how this goes in the years ahead. Maybe the big tests will all become longer than they currently are. Stranger things have happened.