Considering the ongoing debate about at-home testing, I’ve been asked a few times to estimate the total number of high stakes at-home tests being administered for the sake of higher-ed admissions and immigration. This requires a whole lot of guesswork, but it is fun to speculate.
First up, I estimate that the Duolingo English Test is administered about 650,000 times per year. This estimate is based on revenue figures included in Duolingo’s annual reports. Those are all at-home administrations.
Next, I estimate that the TOEFL is taken about 750,000 times per year. This is based on comments from Amit Sevak that the test was taken “almost a million times” circa 2021/22 and my assumption that volumes have declined since then (as they have across the whole industry). Anecdotally, it seems like the at-home TOEFL is extremely popular in some key South Asian markets, where I estimate that more than 40% of TOEFL tests are taken at home. But in the giant Chinese market, the at-home TOEFL appears to be quite unpopular. In fact, test takers there are required to use a workaround via a voucher from Hong Kong just to access it in the first place. The key Korean and Japanese markets seem somewhere in between. Consequently, I estimate that about 25% of all TOEFL tests are now taken at home, or about 188,000 tests per year.
Next, we have the IELTS Official. The most recent numbers from IDP and the BC indicate that they do about 3.5 million IELTS tests per year. Assuming the usual 75/25 split remains accurate, about 2.7 million of those are probably IELTS Academic tests (the only version available online). While the IELTS partners don’t seem very enthusiastic about at-home testing, it is still offered in 86 countries and in the occupied Palestinian territories. The list of where it is available is dominated by EU countries, but it also includes a few spots where access to test centers might be limited. It must be mentioned that the at-home test is NOT available in any of the mega markets that we are all familiar with (India, China, Vietnam and Nigeria). Given all of the above, I estimate that the at-home IELTS accounts for only 5% of all administrations, or about 160,000 tests per year.
Finally, we have the long tail of moderately popular tests that do at least a few at-home administrations (LANGUAGECERT, Michigan, Oxford ELLT, OET, etc) and those which are done exclusively online (Kaplan, Password Plus, PTE Express, etc). I’m not familiar enough with their operations to guess the totals, but surely they all add up.
Based on these estimates, it looks like the big three tests do a combined total of about 998,000 at-home tests per year. If we include the smaller tests in our total, we can assume that well over a million at-home tests are being taken each year for admissions and immigration purposes.
A caveat to keep in mind, of course, is that some people take these tests for professional purposes, certification purposes and for their own amusement.