How to Estimating Your TOEFL Score ?

How to Estimating Your TOEFL Score ?

The Official Guide has a total of 6 practice tests: three in the book and three on the accompanying CD. The tests that are printed in the book come with scoring guides to convert your score to the official 120-point scale, but on the CD-ROM you will only receive a percentage score and, in the case of open-ended questions (like the Writing section), sample answers and raters’ comments on them.

Scoring the Listening and Reading sections is easy; simply look up the percentage you got correct in each section, then convert these figures to the 30-point scale as follows:

Calculating TOEFL Score Based on Percentage Correct

Percentage	Approximate Score
90-100	26-30
80-89	22-25
70-79	17-21
60-69	14-16
50-59	9-13
40-49	7-8
30-39	4-6
20-29	2-4
15-20	1
Below 15	0

This chart is only a guideline for your TOEFL scores, so if your percentage is in the middle of its class, just guesstimate the scaled score. For example, let’s say that I scored a 72% on Reading and 68% on Listening. My scaled Reading score would be about 18, and my scaled Listening score would be a 15 or 16.

For the Writing section, it gets a little fuzzier. Estimate your scores by comparing your essays to the examples given on the CD and noting what characteristics mentioned by the raters are also found in your essays. You will wind up with two numbers, each of which could be as high as 5.  Add these together. Use the chart below to convert your score to the necessary 30-point scale (note that you will only get a score ending in .5 if you have two graders read your essays):

Raw Score	Score out of 30
0	0
.5	4
1	5
1.5	7
2	8
2.5	10
3	11
3.5	12
4	14
4.5	15
5	17
5.5	18
6	20
6.5	21
7	22
7.5	24
8	25
8.5	27
9	28
9.5	29
10	30

Again continuing with my example, let’s say that I gave myself a 4 on the independent task and a 3 on the integrated task. Added together, this is 7, so my writing score would be a 22.

The process for the Speaking section is similar to the Writing section; the only problem is that it’s harder to score yourself on speaking (this shouldn’t stop you from recording and critiquing your responses, though). If you know someone who can rate your speaking responses for you, then tell them that each of the six speaking tasks is worth a total of 4 points and show them the Speaking Scoring Rubric on pages 188-191 of the Official Guide.Once they’ve scored your responses, you can use the chart below to convert that score to the 30-point scale

Raw Score	Score out of 30
0	0
1	1
2	3
3	4
4	5
5	6
6	8
7	9
8	10
9	11
10	13
11	14
12	15
13	17
14	18
15	19
16	20
17	22
18	23
19	24
20	26
21	27
22	28
23	29
24	30

If you can’t get your speaking responses rated, then, as in the Listening section, use the sample answers and commentary provided in the section review to estimate your score.

If I continue my sample scores, I get the following results:

My TOEFL Score, Estimated

SECTION	RAW SCORE	ADJUSTED SCORE
Reading	72	18
Listening	68	16
Writing	7	22
Speaking	19	24

Don’t forget that although this estimation method is a useful tool, the score it gives you is not official. On the actual test, your final score will depend not only on the percentage of correct answers you give, but also on the relative difficulty of the particular test you took. So calculate your practice test scores and use them to measure your progress and preparedness, but don’t be surprised if your official score is a slightly different number. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction, and ultimately keep you from needing to retake the TOEFL because you didn’t estimate correctly.

The score conversion charts used in this blog come from a longer article on estimating scores to practice tests from The Michigan Guide to Teaching EAP Skills. Although the charts are virtually identical, the way that you will use them to score the practice tests from the Official Guide CD is slightly different from the way they are used in the original article. If you want to know more about their use in the Michigan Guide, click the link above to reach the original publication.