I read today that there are now 238,905 international students in Korea (plus 75,033 people studying the Korean language).  That’s kind of interesting.

The top sending countries are China and Vietnam (76k and 63k students, respectively).

(raw data is here)

Some students are on a Korean-language track and might submit a TOPIK score during the admissions process.  Others are on an English-language track and might submit some kind of English test score during the process.

I bet that most of the Vietnamese students on the English track submit an IELTS score, while the Chinese students make use of either TOEFL or IELTS scores, depending on their preference (and I think they are more likely to be on the Korean-language track).

Most of the schools here seem to favor TOEFL and IELTS (and, god bless ‘em, TEPS). There may be an opportunity for smaller tests to make inroads in Korea if they engage with the universities a little more.

If anyone from Duolingo English Test is reading this, you could add Sungkyunkwan University to the tracker on your site.  People say that it’s a pretty good school.  Many years ago I lived near their Suwon campus – I never went inside, but would use it as a starting point for runs along the Suwon Dulle Gil.

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.

There is an article in the Financial Times which rehashes some of the discussions that folks in the UK have been having over the past few weeks.  The opening sentence is “[a] growing number of UK universities are using a test developed by language-learning app Duolingo to judge whether foreign students speak good enough English to enrol on their courses.”

The article includes some sample items from the Duolingo English Test and the IELTS Test.  Specifically, a sample of Duolingo’s “Is this a real word” task and a multiple choice academic reading task from the IELTS.  I’m not sure this is fair.  Perhaps it would have been better to compare the IELTS academic reading task to the Duolingo interactive reading task. Below a sample of that item type.

ELT Journal has published Duolingo’s response to last year’s article by Bruce, et al. about new online English tests and their use in UK admissions.  Regular readers will surely recall the article, as I have referred to it here several times.  It has also been mentioned in the higher-ed press many times. In short, the study suggested that the use of these tests has resulted in the admission of students with poor English abilities.

The authors of the response suggest that the study contains “several substantial flaws that potentially invalidate [its] conclusions.”

To break it down, their main concerns are:

1. The study draws conclusions based solely on the opinions of university staff.  But it does not include performance data like student marks and progression rates to contextualize these perceptions.
2. EAP professionals make up the largest respondent subgroup, “yet they typically work only with students requiring language support, potentially excluding perspectives on higher-proficiency matriculants.”
3. While criticisms were leveled against the Duolingo English Test and other new tests, such tests were used by only a handful of the schools represented in the study.  This suggests that the students with poor English skills referred to by respondents were actually admitted with IELTS scores.
4. I’ll just leave a quote for this one: “Low-quality research, including studies in which the methods and results do not support the conclusions, is potentially detrimental to both future research efforts and society.”
5. Several of the authors of the study are affiliated with the owners of the test (IELTS) which was most praised in the study.  It is suggested that this was not adequately disclosed.